“Quanta sea la aversion entre Portuguéses, y Castellânos, es cósa tan sabída, que no necessita testimónios,” wrote the Spanish Friar, Juan Francisco de San Antonio, O.F.M., in his Chronicas of the Franciscan Order in the Philippines, China, and Japan, printed at the Convent of Our Lady of Loreto, at Sampaloc, a suburb of Manila, in 1738–41 (vol. ii, book i, ch. xv, page 81). Although, like most ex-cathedra pronouncements, this sweeping statement does not hold good for all times and places, it was undoubtedly correct for the region and century with which this essay is primarily concerned.

All the epigraphic material dealt with in this note was recorded in and about the oasis of Najran, situated in the Wadi of the same name at the point where it begins to leave the mountains and to splay out into the great south desert of Arabia. The oasis lies at an altitude of 4,500 feet above sea-level between rugged granite and basalt walls surmounted by a frieze of reddish, rather friable, sandstone averaging 300 feet in thickness with peaks rising out of it to a further height of about 200 feet. The highest points are about 2,000 feet above the valley or 6,500 feet above sea-level. This layer of sandstone overlies the igneous rock of the foundations over a considerable area—westward to near the summit of the main mountain range, northwards right up into Najd, and southwards far into the Yaman. It has obviously played an important part in human history by providing relatively easy trade and invasion routes through an otherwise forbidding tract of granite mountains.

The Jámi‘u’t-Tawáríkh is unquestionably one of the most important historical works in the Persian language, not only by reason of the singularly full and authentic account of the history and antiquities of the Mongols for which it is chiefly celebrated, but also by virtue of the general history, especially the history of the independent or semi-independent post-Muhammadan dynasties which held sway in Persia immediately before the rise of the Mongol dominion (i.e. between the ninth or tenth and the thirteenth centuries of the Christian era), wherewith the author, Rashídu'd-Dín Faḍlu'lláh, or ‘Rashíd the physician’ as he sometimes calls himself, supplemented his original work.

To those interested in the translation of the Bible into Chinese it is well known that there is a manuscript of part of the New Testament in Chinese among the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum. But no exact description of this manuscript seems ever to have been published, and even its author's name was unknown till lately.

On the reliefs of the Gandhāra School, in all scenes where Gautama is shown, and thus in constant association with him, there appears a figure which has been the subject of much discussion. He is called Vajrapāṇi by reason of the thunderbolt which he either grasps by its middle, or supports on the palm of his hand. This thunderbolt is the exact copy of the weapon which Indra, or Sakka, holds; but in these sculptures it is not so much a weapon, to my mind, as it is a symbol of divine authority, which is a matter of importance for the interpretation of the figure.

I propose, in this paper, to review briefly the present stateof the question, and of the answer thereto. Within the last twenty years a great advance has been made with regard to it; and we owe this advance almost entirely to the researches of two savants, Hofraths Dr. J. Wiesner and Dr. J. Karabacek, both Professors in the University of Vienna. In the following review I shall state the results of those researches, together with such conclusions as appear to me legitimately deducible from them.

Al-Manār was an Arabic and reformist journal founded by Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā in Cairo in 1898, and its primary objectives were to examine the decadence of Muslim political institutions, underline the danger of European colonialism in the Muslim world, and promote the idea that Islam was compatible with modernity and reason. The present article attempts to examine the intellectual influence of al-Manār among the Ḥadhramī elite in the Malay-Indonesian world, and critically assess its role as the mouthpiece for the propagation of ‘Abduh's doctrines and accomplishment of his reforms. It first addresses the mission of al-Manār as a reformist journal that worked towards the promotion of social, religious and economic reforms in the Muslim world. It secondly examines the religio-cultural background of the Ḥadhramī elite who were influenced by the reformist mission of al-Manār and subscribed to its ultimate goal. The study finally highlights the impact of al-Manār on the religio-political and social structure of the Ḥadhramī diaspora in the Malay-Indonesian world, and discusses how this impact resulted in the establishment of a revivalist movement that rejected the conservative attitude of blind imitation (taqlīd ) of the four schools of Islamic law, and denounced the Sufi practices that were not in harmony with the fundamentals of Islam. Special attention will also be paid to the role of the Ḥadhramī organisations, schools and press that contributed to the propagation of al-Manār's reformist mission and its dissemination at the grass roots level of the Ḥadhramī community.

One of the enduring open questions in ancient Indian history is the identity of the king who identifies himself on the reverse of his gold coins as prakāśāditya. Most authors have assumed that he was a Gupta king. This paper reviews the various proposals on the identity of Prakāśāditya, arguing why we can be quite sure, as suggested by Robert Göbl, that he was in fact a Hun king and not a Gupta. Then, by presenting a near-complete reading of the obverse legend, it is shown that it is virtually certain that he was in fact the Hun king Toramāṇa, as Göbl had speculated. Implications of this finding are then considered.

Sa‘d b. Mansūr Ibn Kammūna, a Jewish polymath whose writings are now receiving a good deal of scholarly attention, worked in Baghdad under the aegis of the Mongol rulers and their courtiers. Born early in the thirteenth century, so it seems, he was forced to flee the capital after rioters protested against his book which compared the three revealed monotheistic faiths; he died in the 1280s. His oeuvre includes a treatise on ophthalmology, no longer extant; quotations from it are however available in the writing of another ophthalmologist, Sadaqa ibn Ibrāhīm al-Shādhilī. From these we learn that Ibn Kammūna practiced medicine in Aleppo (Halab).

This article focuses on some representations of Aurangzeb in the Nath Yogi lore; their ambivalence appears as a signifier of the complex relationships the Nath Yogis had with Islam. Aurangzeb figures both as a powerful enemy and as a clumsy devotee, he is depicted more as a symbol than as an historical individual character.

“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodged in my mind for the several decades during which I have been working, on and off, on this early Persian historian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I read it originally in that monument of mid-Victorian Anglo-Indian scholarship, The History of India as told by its own Historians. The Muhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliott and John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists of translated extracts, many quite lengthy, from texts illustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent, the greater part of them dealing with what was then some eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. In Volume II, the compilers presented several passages from Bayhaqī's work, The History of Sultan Maʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appeared in a printed edition at Calcutta in the Bibliotheca Indica series, edited by the person who had in fact produced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H. Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, but sometimes employed local munshis, not always with happy results. Although Persian culture was still very much alive in India in the mid-nineteenth century, these munshis were far from being au fait with the early eleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and were at times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One of my favourites here is the Persian saying ṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand, translated literally and ludicrously in its context as “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Why anyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum, in the midst of a high-level discussion between Sultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalent of a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom, already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, the Shāh-nāma, means of course “to spread rumours clandestinely”.

Khwājah Qāsim Tushtarī’s recently discovered Recognizing God (Maʿrifat-i Khudāy taʿālā) is one of the only texts known to have survived from the early Alamūt period of Ismaili Muslim history. This article analyses the work in the context of the “new Invitation” (daʿwat-i jadīd) to the Ismaili faith that al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153) tells us was inaugurated by the Fāṭimid Imam al-Mustanṣir billāh (d. 487/1094) and championed by Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (d. 518/1124). The text emphasises that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to know God, and that the path to this knowledge is through the Imam of the Time. The concepts of the ‘true teacher’ (muʿallim-i ṣādiq) and ‘sage’ (ḥakīm) are examined and the literary culture fostered at the Ismaili fortresses, particularly Girdkūh, is explored. Significantly, the article draws attention to the position of Sanāʾī Ghaznawī (d. circa 525/1131) in Persian Ismaili literature and to the very early development of pious, devotional and homiletic poetry as well as the “mathnawī metre” in Ismaili environments, which may have helped set the stage for some of the most significant poetic achievements of mystical Islam: the writings of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. circa 618/1221) and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273).

This article examines the usage and sense of hātąm ‘of beings’ and the adjective haiθiia- ‘true’, both from the present participle haṇt- ‘being’, in the Old Avestan texts. It argues that the first is a rhetorical figure that enhances the stature of its complement and does not denote any particular kind of being whether divine or mortal. haiθiia- consistently appears in contexts that may be legitimately described as eschatological. Most often it qualifies a certain type of activity that leads to or constitutes a ‘splendid’ state of existence. What truly is, the article concludes, refers to existence beyond mortal life.

In the aftermath of the Mongol occupations of the largest and most populous societies of Eurasia, greater visibility of popular religion, more widespread vernacular language use, rising literacy, and fundamental shifts in the structure of rulership and the relationship of state and society could all be observed. Many historians have related these changes to a broader chronology of early modernity. This has been problematic in the case of Iran, whose eighteenth-century passage has not been adequately explored in recent scholarship. Our comparative review of ‘post-Mongol’ Iran and China suggests that this period marks as meaningful a break between a schematic medieval and schematic early modern history in Iran as it does in China. Here, we first consider both societies in the post-Mongol period as empires with secular rulerships and increasingly popular cultural trends, and look at the role of what Crossley has called “simultaneous rulership”—rulership in which the codes of legitimacy of civilisations recognised by the conquest authority are given distinct representation in the rulership — in marking the transition away from religious-endorsed rule to self-legitimating rule as a mark of comparative early modernity.

Among all the inequalities of traditional Chinese society, education was one of the most obvious. In most cases, girls and women were not expected to receive education at the highest level and in late Qing China, most Chinese women did not have access to a university education. Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), an educator of the late Qing era and of Republican China, was renowned for his progressivism towards women. His broad-mindedness can be perceived in the way he advocated and implemented for girls and women educational opportunities on a par with those available to boys and men. Although many of his well-known contemporaries shared similarly progressive ideas on women, none of them are regarded as the initiator of the admittance of women to China's national universities. Actually during the May Fourth Period Cai was Chancellor of an important academic institution in China and thus strategically placed at a decisive moment in modern Chinese history.

This article explores the local context of the prominence of Sufism and sanctity in the late medieval period (1250–1500) through an examination of the diffusion of the Qādirī spiritual path in the spatial frame of Palestine. The geographical spread of the major spiritual paths (ṭarīqas) and the emergence of their shaykhs as charismatic figures in the course of the late medieval period has received considerable attention by historians of Sufism. Although the study of the social historical dimensions of the universal evolution and its nuances and variations is in order, patiently asked questions remain open regarding the establishment of the ṭarīqas into locally embedded associations around charismatic shaykhs in particular historical and geographical settings, as well as the role local leaders of the ṭarīqas played in shaping a communities' life and space.

That Buddhism prevailed extensively in the Dekkan during the period of its ascendancy in India, is evident, from the imperishable monuments of that religion existing in the celebrated caves of Ellora (Verul), K´rli, Ajanta, and Salsette (Sáshte). It would give, however, but a very imperfect and limited idea of the influence and extensive ramifications of Buddhism, to suppose that its monuments are confined to places of such celebrity. To speak only of the neighbourhood of Bombay, small caves having inscriptions in the ancient cave character are to be found in the hills near Nasik and Junír. Even at the comparatively unimportant villages of Máhar on the Bánkot river, and Kher, twelve miles distant, there are excavations of a similar kind, which I myself have visited. Some of them still contain a dágoba, and others fragments of stone, belonging to a previously existing place of that kind; and I have no doubt that many similar caves exist throughout the country, though they never have been brought to public notice. When, then, stations of Buddhist priests existed in such places as these, to say the least, their influence in the country around must have been considerable. At the commencement of the controversy between the rival sects, the Buddhists seem to have had the decided superiority. Buddhism is eminently a religion of reason: it rejects all that reason does not comprehend; and makes its constant appeal to (Buddhi) the human intellect, as the supreme judge in religious things. Brahmanism, on the contrary, is a religion of tradition.