The nucleus of the present article was meant in the first instance to be added as a note to a chronological list of definitions of the terms ‘Ṣúfí’ and ‘Taṣawwuf’ chiefly compiled from the Risála of Qushayrí (Cairo, 1287 a.h.), the Tadhkiratu'l-Awliyá of Farídu'ddín ‘Aṭṭár (cited as T.A.), and the Nafaḥátu'l-Uns of Jámí (Calcutta, 1859). These works contain about a hundred definitions of ‘Ṣúfí’ and ‘Taṣawwuf,’ none of which exceeds a few lines in length. I thought that it might be interesting, and possibly instructive, to arrange the most important in their chronological sequence, so far as that can be determined, since only in this way are they capable of throwing any light upon the historical development of Ṣúfiism. The result, however, was somewhat meagre. Taken as a whole, those brief sentences which often represent merely a single aspect of the thing defined, a characteristic point of view, or perhaps a momentarily dominant mood, do undoubtedly exhibit the gradual progress of mystical thought in Islam from the beginning of the third to the end of the fourth century after the Hijra, but the evidence which they supply is limited to a vague outline. Accordingly, I resolved to undertake a chronological examination of the doctrine taught by the authors of these definitions and by other distinguished Ṣúfís, and I have here set down the conclusions to which I have come. I do not claim to have exhausted all the available material.

In Rajasthan, one of the north-western states of India, whoever has heard of the Kāmaḍ (or Kāmaḍiyā) would define them as wandering minstrels or jugglers, singing hymns in praise of Bābā Rāmdeo, a famous saint from Mārwāṛ, whose footprints they worship. Most people could not say much more about this community of religious singers who, since Independence, have been listed among the “scheduled castes”. In any case, everybody seems to be aware of their connection with Rāmdeo, a famous folk deity, also popular in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, now venerated by devotees of all castes and creeds, but mostly by Hindus, as an avatār of Vishnu-Krishna.

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.

It is well-known that Maimonides (1135–1204), one of the greatest philosophers and experts in Jewish law (Halakhah), was an eminent physician as well. He probably studied medicine during his sojourn in Fez (Morocco) between 1158 and 1165, after he and his family had fled from his native city Cordoba, because of the persecutions by the fanatical Muslim regime of the Almohades.

The scantiness of Parthian inscribed material enhances the importance of any new find. The existence of inscriptions and drawings on the rock-walls of a gorge near Birjand (Southern Khorasan) had been known for some time; but their antiquity was not recognized until Mr. Jamal Rezai, a Persian student from Birjand, visited the gorge and took photographs, which he submitted to Dr. Sadiq Kiya, of the University of Tehran. Dr. Kiya at once correctly identified the writing as Parthian and, in company with Mr. Rezai, published the whole material, together with a preliminary reading of the inscriptions. Dr. Richard N. Frye also paid a visit to the site and reported on it briefly in the Persian literary monthly Mihr. Later some uninformed criticism, claiming modern origin of the remains, appeared in the same periodical; it was justly refuted by Dr. Kiya.

On the 1st of June 1823, I visited the “Pinjra Pol,” at Surat; a place which is appropriated for the reception of old, worn-out, lame, or disabled animals. At that time, they chiefly consisted of buffaloes and cows; but there were also goats and sheep, and even cocks and hens; some of which latter had lost their feathers, and here, shorn of their plumes, walked about the courts without molestation.

While Islamic scriptures like the Quran and Hadith are often quoted to negate the existence of social stratification among Muslims, authors of genealogical texts rely on the very same scriptures to foreground and legitimise discussions on descent and lineage. In the South Asian context, several conceptions of hierarchy as practised by Muslims in north India evolved over the course of colonial rule and were deployed interchangeably by Sayyids. These were based on notions of race, ethnicity, respectability and nobility, and occupational distinctions as well as narratives that referred to the history of early Islam. This article contributes to the study of social stratification among South Asian Muslims by exploring the evolution of Urdu tarikh (historical texts) produced by Sayyid men in the qasbah of Amroha in the Rohilkhand region of the United Provinces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sayyid authors narrated the past through the medium of nasab (genealogy). While their texts place emphasis on lineage and descent to legitimise a superior social status for Sayyids, they also shed light on the changing social and material context of the local qasbah politics with the discourse on genealogy evolving into a form that engaged with social contestations.

The Moorish traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa occupies a peculiar place in medieval geography, not only because his journeys were so extensive, exceeding in length even those of Marco Polo, but because the record of them contains such a fantastic mixture of items of information, some valuable or precise, others worthless or vague in the extreme, regarding the different cities, provinces, and distinguished men that he had seen. Everyone who has traced out his journey step by step must agree that there are serious arguments against the trustworthiness of his statements regarding several of the cities which he claimed to have visited. On the other hand, it is exceedingly difficult to substantiate the suspicions thus aroused. He was a skilful narrator, and did not himself, as is well known, write down the record of his journeys; consequently the existence of one or two errors in his account of a city or a district does not prove anything against him, since it must be allowed that his memory occasionally played him false. Besides, Ibn Battuta was a typical son of the medieval East, a fact which explains certain systematic faults in his narrative. For example, he is very inconsequent; sometimes he speaks at length of a small village, and sometimes devotes no more than one or two words to a celebrated city. Sometimes, but not always, he gives an impression of sincerity, saving frankly that he was badly treated by so-and-so, or that he was told about such and such a city or country, but did not himself visit it. For this reason one is naturally inclined to accept his word when he says that he personally visited a place.

There are a number of journeys made, or alleged to have been made, in Arabia between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century of which there is no mention, or at least no adequate account, in Hogarth's Penetration of Arabia or in R. H. Kiernan's Unveiling of Arabia. Many of these omissions are due to the little use they made of the Portuguese historians.

It is unfortunate that I have no copy of this interesting book that is complete or in good condition. I possess a broken remnant (D.C. 45 of my collection of MSS.), blotted, dog-eared, and often illegible, and a book of excerpts copied by a priest in Baghdad. The latter (D.C. 46) is extremely incorrect. Besides these, I have borrowed and transliterated pages from another fragmentary loose-leaved copy, brittle with age. All these manuscripts were illiterate and corrupt, each talisman displayed variations due to miscopying or miscomprehension, so that originally identical texts showed considerable differences. A dictionary-maker, however, may neglect no text, however corrupt, and although the illiteracy of scribes has led me on many a wildgoose chase, the labour has been amply compensated.

Poverty in medieval Islam is an enormous topic. It is worth considering from a historian's point of view, especially in the light of what has been accomplished by historians of Rome, Byzantium, and the medieval and modern West who have dealt with poverty and the poor. But as always, the sources for Islamic history, especially for the formative early centuries, present difficulties. Here I wish to make a preliminary attempt at dealing with part of this problem. I shall begin by considering an event which represents a turning point in the history of the Muslim poor, or more accurately, in the way poverty and the poor have been represented in modern historical scholarship on medieval Islam. Then I shall suggest a way in which this event may be set in context, and a possible strategy for handling some of the relevant sources. This strategy involves the identification of different, competing ways in which the poor were defined in the first centuries of Islam.

To examine a piece of literature bearing a great name and find that it has been wrongly ascribed may be profitable if the work is interesting. Unfortunately, the collection of letters described in Professor Browne's Literary History of Persia (vol. iii, pp. 80 ff.) and the Catalogue of Oriental MSS. belonging to E. G. Browne (pp. 146 f.) would only have had interest and significance if they had indeed been a transcript of the vizier Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍl-Allah's own correspondence or despatches.

Although the religion founded by Mohammed is called by strangers after his name, its followers designate it differently. There is indeed a name which rarely occurs, ḥammādūna, which is applied to them, and which indirectly, at least, is connected with the name of the Prophet. That word signifies “Those who utter the formula ‘Praise be to God,’” and this formula (al-ḥamdu lillāhi) has some connection with the Prophet's name, which was interpreted by his contemporaries as ‘the greatly to be praised.’

With the Tatar tribe which inhabits the north-eastern region of Poland there is connected a little known page not only of Polish history, but of history in general. Whereas all other Muslim peoples established themselves in Europe as conquerors (omitting the majority of Muslims in Yugoslavia, who are of Serb origin and were converted to Islam by their Turkish conquerors), the Polish Tatars inhabit a region never touched by a Muslim invader, and history teaches us that they began to settle in Poland from the middle of the fourteenth century and already professed the religion of Islam.

This article explores Islamic networks, as constituted by migration of people, movement of saints and philanthropic institutional links, across the Indian Ocean. Linking Bombay, Hyderabad and the Muslim diasporas of East Africa, these transnational Shi‘i networks forge a print-based public sphere and determine routes for the circulation of media technology. Moreover, this article argues, that they deploy this technology to enable Islamic reformism in ways that are distinct to the local urban cultures in which they are set. The article examines two initiatives that apply technology towards different conceptions of Shi‘i reformism: while one reform initiative attempts to situate itself within a secular liberal public, another seeks to interrogate secular liberal assumptions by establishing an authentic Islamic society; both then, are underpinned by different goals, internal contestations and diverse trajectories. This article seeks to emphasize the ongoing impact of historically shaped networks of community migration and organisation: both the use of technology in mediating Islamic reform, and attempts to articulate a moral Islamic universalism, which have in practice been determined by these existing transnational networks.

South of Arṣūf-Apollonia, on the western edge of the modern city of Herzliya (Israel), at the top of a limestone hill overlooking the sea, stands a rectangular fortress-like building (Fig. 1), commonly known as Mashhad Sayyidnā ‘Alī – a name derived from that of ‘Alī b. ‘Alīm, who lies buried there. The story of Sayyidnā ‘Alī, which I would like to set forth in this article, combines three intertwined aspects that shed light on Muslim Palestine and Syria (bilād al-shām) in the Middle Ages.

Kumzāri is a dialect spoken exclusively by certain coastal elements of the Shiḥuḥ tribe, the Kumāzara section, who occupy Kumzār at the head of the Musandam Peninsula of Oman, and are found at Dibah, Khasab, the coastal villages of Elphinstone and Malcolm Inlets and at Larek Island.

This article begins with the premise that nostalgia haunts histories of Indian Muslim cultural and social life but remains curiously underspecified with relation to Muslim political life. By looking at the figure of Mohamed Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) and a constellation of transnational initiatives around the year 1913 in particular, it suggests ways in which we might redeploy nostalgia in order to look for temporal and spatial ambivalence in historical moments. In turn, that ambivalence points to the limitations of understanding nostalgia as purely a longing for another place and a past time.

For most of the Islamic period central and southern Jordan has existed on the periphery of larger states. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the political and economic life of the Muslim and Frankish polities of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria) was dominated by cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Acre. These urban centres contained the greatest concentrations of the military and civilian elite, and provided the largest markets for locally produced and imported commodities. Intellectual activity also prospered in such urban environments and, with few exceptions, it was the occupants of the cities of Bilad al-Sham who composed the histories of the Crusader states and the Ayyubid confederacy. These chronicles tend to reflect the interests of the ruling elites and generally pay rather less attention to rural areas. The lands between the Wadi Zarqa' and the Red Sea – populated as they were by villages and small market towns – excited little interest among historians, and only Karak and Shawbak merit relatively regular mentions in the chronicles of the period.

There was a time, when to treat of the small-pox must have been a task truly painful; when, alas! little more could be done than to trace its devastations and its horrors: but, thanks to heaven and the perseverance of the benevolent, those days are long past, and the subject can at length be viewed in a very different light. Relieved from the distressing office of but too frequently having to offer a vain consolation to a virtuous mother sorrowing for the loss of a darling child, medical men can now speak of the disease with far other feelings; with the same satisfaction, to use a metaphor, that is felt in painting the blessings of an honourable peace, which have succeeded to a long and disastrous war; or the joy of a private family, which has finally risen into comfort and security, through a protracted struggle of domestic affliction.