Islam is often seen as playing only a minor role in pre-colonial Malay political life. J. M. Gullick, for instance, in his seminal work Indigenous political systems of Western Malaya concludes that Islam “was not to any significant extent a ‘state religion’”. The “chaplains of the more devout Sultans and chiefs”, he explains, “never attained any collective importance in the political system owing to the lack of organization”; there were “no Kathis (Muslim judges and registrars) until the era of British protection”; and no evidence exists that “Islamic legal doctrine” was “effective law”?

Hunter's Indian Musalmans was completed in mid-June and published in mid-August of 1871. It consists of four chapters of which the first three are devoted to the so-called Indian Wahhābī movement and its aftermath, with particular reference to Bengal. The last chapter analyzes the Muslims' grievances and suggests some modification in the state system of education in order to attract them to it and make them more suitable for official employment, thereby weaning them away from the path of disloyalty. It is principally because of this last chapter that the book has been invested with a new significance in the context of later political developments in British India. Hunter has been regarded as the progenitor of Muslim separatism and has even been linked with a deliberate official policy of divide and rule.

A glance at any map of excavated sites in Iran will show clearly the relative rarity of controlled excavations north and east of the Tehran region. A cluster of sites in the vicinity of Behshahr, four in the neighbourhood of the Gorgan plain, two from the flat terrain immediately south of the eastern Elburz, and only one near Meshed represent the sum total of those north-eastern settlements that have attracted archaeological expeditions between the years 1930 and 1964. As a consequence, our excavated evidence from this extensive area is astonishingly slight, particularly following the fall of the rich Bronze Age “Gorgan Culture” in the middle of the second millennium b.c.

The Chinggisids clearly favoured specific in-law clans through policies of repeated marriage over generations. This paper charts the fortunes of one such clan, the Oirats, who first joined the Chinggisids when Chinggis Khan and Börte's daughter Chechiyegen wedded an Oirat prince. Thereafter Chechiyegen's own daughters married back to the Toluid, Jochid and Chagatayid families. This paper follows those Oirats who intermarried with the Ilkhanids, beginning with Chechiyegen's daughter Güyük and ending with the Toluid-Oirat Ilkhan, Abū Sa‘īd (r. 1317-1335).

1. The Problem. The chain of incident and action in Śūdraka's deservedly popular drama Mṛcchakaṭika commences with a peculiar ritual on a dark night. The hero Cārudatta, an impoverished but virtuous brahmin caravan merchant, has just finished his evening prayers. At the beginning of the first act, he asks his clownish brahmin friend Maitreya to help in the consummation: kṛto mayā gṛhadevatābhyo baliḥ; gaccha, tvam api catuṣpathe mātṛbhyo balim upahara. “I have completed the bali (food-)offerings to the household gods; go thou, offer (this) bali to the Mothers at the crossroads.” This simple request leads to the rescue of the heroine Vasantasenā from abduction. Here we leave the development of the plot, to investigate the ritual.

When the Persians, led by Darius, had slain Gaumāta the Magian and a great number of his colleagues (. . . ἔκτεινον κου τιν μάγον εὕρισκον), they instituted an annual feast to remind the Magians of their humiliation: it was called τά μαγοϕόνια (Herodotus, iii, 79), or μαϒοϕονία (Ctesias, epit. Photii 15, § 46 ed. Gilmore). Gilmore (p. 149 n.) wisely remarked that “the agreement of Herodotus and Ctesias makes it impossible to doubt the existence of this strange custom”. Ctesias. after having stayed at the Persian court for seventeen years, could not help knowing whether or not such a feast existed, and he would never have foregone the opportunity of correcting his predecessor.

During the summer of 330 b.c. Alexander the Great pursued the Persian king Darius III through Northern Media, past the Caspian Gates, and eastward into the Achaemenid satrapy of Parthava (Parthia). Upon reaching Darius, Alexander found the king murdered by the usurper Bessus. The Macedonian thereafter advanced east for three more days until he arrived at the wealthy city which was later to be called Hecatompylos. It is the problems of Hecatompylos and the several related questions of its home district, called Comisene by the Greeks, which this paper will consider.

The introduction to the edition of the fárs-námeh of “Ibn al-Balkhí” by Mr. Le Strange and Professor Nicholson contains a long passage dealing with the end of the Buwayhid or Búyid dynasty. This passage, and particularly its footnotes, show that there are points in this section of history that it would be interesting to clear up. I have attempted to clear them up in what follows. For the purpose I have used a number of Arabic and Persian works, indicated respectively in the footnotes to my account by the letters or words preceding each name in the following list.

The question of the origins of Chinese civilization has fascinated scholars for a long time, but, in spite of the great advances that have come from recent archaeological discoveries, we still find extreme divergences of opinion on basic issues. The reasons for this are not far to seek. There are still enormous gaps in the evidence, and to fill in the picture at all one must extrapolate beyond what can be definitely proved. In such circumstances subjective considerations are bound to affect the judgment and what seems no more than an obvious inference to one person will seem wildly speculative to someone else. So it is with the question of indigenous development versus outside influence. To some Chinese scholars brought up within the self-sufficient tradition of their own culture it seems natural to assume that unless there is absolutely overwhelming evidence to the contrary, everything essential in Chinese civilization, including the basic inventions of agriculture, metallurgy, etc., developed from its own creative energies without outside influence. Hypotheses of contacts across Central Asia which cannot yet be documented in the absence of archaeological exploration in the intervening regions are stigmatized as far-fetched, whereas theories, as little based on evidence, about as yet unattested earlier stages of culture within China itself are advanced as matters of logical necessity.

There are not many people who can be said to have done something first. To Xanthus of Lydia belongs the distinction of being the first person on record to write in Greek about Zoroaster and aspects of Iranian religion. Not a Greek but writing in Greek, and living in the country that still joins Asia and Europe, he was to play an exemplary role in presenting details of an eastern religion directly to a western audience.

This article uses Chinese sources to argue that a range of gunpowder weapons was already in use in China during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, earlier than previously thought. ‘True firearms’, that is cannon or guns firing solid projectiles, had quite probably been developed by at least as early as 1200 ce.

In the spring of 1938 I was able with valuable help from the Royal Air Force and the material support of the Iraq Petroleum Company to carry out a survey of ancient remains along a portion of Rome's Mesopotamian Limes in the extreme north-west of Iraq. These explorations were closely connected with the researches which Père A. Poidebard, S.J., had effected before on the Syrian Limes and recorded in a masterly publication. In the following autumn the survey was resumed by me with the same generous aid and continued until May, 1939, along all routes protected by Roman defences that could be traced from the Tigris and Euphrates into the Syrian desert and thence through Transjordan down to the Gulf of Aqaba.

It is well known that at the advent of Islam there were three Jewish tribes who lived in Yathrib (later Medina), as well as other Jewish settlements further to the north, the most important of which were Khaybar and Fadak. It is also generally accepted that at first the Prophet Muḥammad hoped that the Jews of Yathrib, as followers of a divine religion, would show understanding of the new monotheistic religion, Islam. However, as soon as these tribes realized that Islam was being firmly established and gaining power, they adopted an actively hostile attitude, and the final result of the struggle was the disappearance of these Jewish communities from Arabia proper.

This article draws on a wide range of Shiʽi periodicals and monographs from the 1950s until the present day to investigate debates on the status of Sayyids in Pakistan. I argue that the discussion by reformist and traditionalist Shiʽi scholars (ʽulama) and popular preachers has remained remarkably stable over this time period. Both ‘camps’ have avoided talking about any theological or miracle-working role of the Prophet's kin. This phenomenon is remarkable, given the fact that Sayyids share their pedigree with the Shiʽi Imams, who are credited with superhuman qualities. Instead, Shiʽi reformists and traditionalists have discussed Sayyids predominantly as a specific legal category. They are merely entitled to a distinct treatment as far as their claims to charity, patterns of marriage, and deference in daily life is concerned. I hold that this reductionist and largely legalising reading of Sayyids has to do with the intense competition over religious authority in post-Partition Pakistan. For both traditionalist and reformist Shiʽi authors, ʽulama, and preachers, there was no room to acknowledge Sayyids as potential further competitors in their efforts to convince the Shiʽi public about the proper ‘orthodoxy’ of their specific views.

Javanese literature can boast a distinct genre of works about the adventures of wandering students/scholars, who travel about the countryside in pursuit of esoteric knowledge. Journeying and undergoing various trials and tribulations on the way is regarded in Javanese culture as an ascetic practice, preparatory to ultimate enlightenment. An early, pre-Islamic representative of this genre is the Kidung Subrata, dated 1541. The best-know examples, at least by name, i.e. the Cĕnṭini and Jatiswara, probably originate from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the course of time these two stories were constantly reworked until by the beginning of the nineteenth century they reached massive proportions and were made into storehouses of encyclopaedic knowledge of all kinds of things Javanese. The so-called Major Cěntini, compiled in 1814 at the Surakarta Crown Prince's court, has hitherto received most attention. Quite a few scholars, guided by Pigeaud's table of contents, have tapped this source for information on many topics.

In 1076, some twenty years before the First Crusade was launched, Pope Gregory VII wrote to al-Nāşir, Sultan of Bougie in what is now Algeria:

For there is nothing which Almighty God, who wishes that all men should be saved and that no man should perish, more approves in our conduct, than that a man should first love God and then his fellow men … Most certainly you and we ought to love each other in this way more than other races of men, because we believe and confess one God, albeit in different ways, whom each day we praise and reverence as the creator of all ages and the governor of this world. For, as the Apostle says: “He is our peace, who hath made both one”.

This enlightened view of Islam was not widely shared in Latin Christendom at that time, nor was it rooted in any very profound knowledge of the Muslim religion. B. Z. Kedar is, I think, correct in his view that a good deal of information about Islam was available in the West before the crusades, both in written and oral sources, but because there was a general lack of interest in the subject, no attempt had been made to coordinate this knowledge.

Tanjore in South India during the reign of Raja Serfoji II (1798–1832), is a hitherto unexamined episode of both colonial science and of ‘Enlightenment’ in the non-western context. If Joseph Banks, a product of the English Enlightenment, was a metropolitan ‘centre of calculation’ directing and controlling a collecting network in India between the 1770s and 1820, it is argued that Raja Serfoji was his native counterpart, exhibiting similar formal properties, and drawing on those very same ideas and networks of metropolitan practice to systematically produce useful knowledge. This case study demonstrates strongly (among other things) the weaknesses of the centre-periphery model of scientific practice. It shows how the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are not determined by virtue of the geographical location, but by the nature of practice, which is a combined effect of social, scientific and power relations. Thus, this article examines the ways in which it became possible for a small quasi-Indian state in early nineteenth-century South India to leap onto the threshold of modernity, by generating an intellectual ferment of the kind that it did, as a unique native response to the western encounter.

Among the languages of the Austronesian stock, formerly called the Malayo-Polynesian family, several are entitled to the name of literary languages, languages with a literature of their own in refined prose and poetry.

The strife over the succession of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustanṣir left a decisive mark on the later history of the Ismaili sect. The quarrel between the followers of his two rival sons, al-Musta'lī and Nizār, did not end with the defeat and death of the latter; his adherents, the Nizāris, formed a sect of their own, and the rulers of the Musta'lid branch had no enemies more bitter. The fortunes of the whole Ismaili movement might have taken a very different turn had the redoubtable Assassins made common cause with the Fatimids of Egypt, instead of seizing every opportunity to harm them.

After the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre of shahr āshob to recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speaking ashrāf in the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled ‘The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī)’ (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with the shahr āshob tradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previous shahr āshobs. Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of ‘The Lament for Delhi’ both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speaking ashrāf and on the cultural and social history of colonial India.