Having procured three manuscripts of this work, I at first proposed to edit the text. But in going through the work for that purpose I soon found that Professor Kielhorn was right in supposing it to be too dependent on Sāyaṇna to deserve publication in full. Under these circumstances Professor Macdonell suggested to me that I should collect all that was of interest in the work. This I have here attempted to do.

This paper is a reconsideration of the career of the north-Indian Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed (1786–1831). I argue that Sayyid Ahmed used a Sufi devotional premise to understand and explain principles of orthodoxy. He also applied a concept of innate spiritual knowledge to reformed practice, suggesting that ordinary people, without scholarly training, could determine and apply the principles of orthodox practice of Islam for themselves and for others. His movement modified traditional seminary-centred teaching and leadership through the creation of a popular and easily transferrable system of practice rooted in the community and imprinted with the obligation to spread reformist teachings.

This analysis of certain rock carvings at Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar is in the form of an Archaeological Report, but is not a full Archaeological Survey. This has been carried out by others – (Hans Kapel Arryan, Qatar National Museum Journal, 1983, pp. 1–126) for Jabal Jusasiyah Qatar. A systematic procedure is adopted for the analysis of a number of these petroglyphs at the sites in Qatar.

The origin of the Indian alphabet is a matter of very considerable interest and importance. Was the art of writing introduced from foreign lands, or was it an indigenous invention; and in what age did it first make its appearance? Opinions differ on these points, for there is no certain evidence; and the conclusions arrived at are based entirely on inference and probability. The balance of opinion has perhaps, hitherto, inclined to the theory of a Semitic origin, and a late writer on the subject, our learned colleague Dr. Burnell, has given a very decided opinion on that side of the question. To his judgment I pay due deference, but the arguments with which he supports it seem to me inconclusive and unsatisfactory. I propose, therefore, to review briefly the whole subject.

It is by no means unknown, in Middle-Eastern art-music traditions, to find claims that a given rhythmic cycle was invented on a particular occasion by a particular musician, the most obvious and reliable instance being provided by ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Marāġī (d. 1435), who tells us that he was commissioned to create a new cycle to commemorate a victory. With frenkçin, then, a cycle where the very name clearly suggests some form of western derivation or inflection, it was perhaps only to be expected that we should encounter a similar narrative that pinpointed its origin, associating its creation with the impulse provided by a particular cultural encounter with the West. It has to be said, though, that no such account appears as a standard feature of the contemporary theoretical discourse surrounding Turkish art music: works that deal with the rhythmic cycles tend to be expository catalogues unconcerned with origins and derivations, and it is only in one major modern reference work that we come across the notion of western inspiration, together with a tentative suggestion as to the period during which frenkçin emerged. The detailed narrative of origin certainly first appears in a text by an eminent Turkish scholar, but it is one written in French—the comprehensive survey article by Rauf Yekta Bey published in 1922—and possibly in consequence it has so far been relayed primarily in western languages. The discussion by Kösemihal, the one significant Turkish scholar to have accepted this account, appears to have had little impact, and it remains to be seen whether the relatively recent translation of Rauf Yekta Bey's article into Turkish will stimulate renewed interest in this version in Turkey itself.

A fresh look at the 1888 Sikkim Expedition using both Chinese and English language sources yields very different conclusions from that of previous research on the subject. During the course of policymaking, the British Foreign Office and the British Government of India did not collaborate to devise a plan to invade Tibet; conversely, their aims differed and clashed frequently. During the years leading to war, the largest newspapers in British India gave plenty of coverage to the benefits of trade with Tibet, thus influencing British foreign policy and contributing indirectly to the outbreak of war. The Tibetan army was soundly defeated in the war, while the British troops suffered only light casualties. Although the Tibetan elites remained committed to the war, the lower classes of Tibetan society quickly grew weary of it. During the war, the British made much use of local spies and enjoyed an advantage in intelligence gathering, which contributed greatly to their victory. Finally, although the war was initially fought over trade issues, the demarcation of the Tibetan-Sikkim border replaced trade issues as the main point of contention during the subsequent peace negotiations. During the negotiations, Sheng Tai, the newly appointed Amban of Tibet, tried his best to defend China's interests.

In premodern monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of major and minor traditions formed a cosmopolis of laws which expanded chronologically and geographically. Without necessarily replacing one another, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place. In this legal cosmopolis, each tradition had its own aggregation of diverse juridical, linguistic and contextual variants. In South and Southeast Asia, Islam has accordingly formed its own cosmopolis of law by incorporating a network of different juridical texts, institutions, jurists and scholars and by the meaningful use of these variants through shared vocabularies and languages. Focusing on the Shāfiʿī School of Islamic law and its major proponents in Malay and Arabic textual productions, this article argues that the intentional choice of a lingua franca contributed to the wider reception and longer sustainability of this particular legal school. The Arabic and Malay microcosmoi thus strengthened the larger cosmopolis of Islamic law through transregional and translinguistic exchanges across legal, cultural and continental borders.

In the ongoing debate regarding the construction of the modern concept of “Hinduism”, recent research has considered the ways in which the pre-colonial encounter with Islam may have served as a catalyst in the crystallisation of an increasingly self-aware “Hindu” identity. Andrew Nicholson (Unifying Hinduism, 2010), in particular, has examined the genre of Sanskrit doxography to affirm that such a process of crystallisation was indeed taking place, as the transformations in this genre over time indicate a nascent Hindu identity emerging in the face of the “Muslim threat”. This article reevaluates Nicholson's account with reference to the writings of one Sanskrit intellectual operating at the height of Muslim power in South Asia: the figure of Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (fl. sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries). Madhusūdana's short doxography, the Prasthānabheda, often features in arguments for the pre-colonial roots of the concept of “Hinduism”; Madhusūdana's other doxographical writings, however, are typically neglected. Based upon an analysis of Madhusūdana's Siddhāntabindu and Vedāntakalpalatikā, this article suggests that a more nuanced consideration of the different audiences and authorial intentions that different doxographers had in mind can offer a modified picture of how early modern Sanskrit intellectuals were responding to the Muslim presence in the subcontinent.

It is perhaps difficult to exaggerate the importance from the point of view of the literary history of India of the Bṛhaddevatā attributed to Śaunaka. That this has not hitherto received full recognition is due in part to the fact that it has been held, for example even by Dr. E. Sieg, that the Bṛhaddevatā is later in date than the Mahābhārata. This is, however, certainly not the case, as Professor A. A. Macdonell has shown conclusively in his edition of the former work. About 300 ślokas of the work are devoted to legends, and this must, it seems, be regarded as a conclusive proof that at the date of its composition there existed in Sanskrit an ākhyāna or itihāsa literature. Now the date of the Bṛhaddevatā is fixed by Professor Macdonell, on grounds which appear to me unassailable, at about 400 b.c., perhaps earlier. It follows, therefore, that a Sanskrit itihāsa literature can be proved to have existed in the fifth century b.c.

This article contains ethnolinguistic observations and materials on the so called zâr cult, as practiced in present day Hormozgân province, Iran. The cult, which is spread across the Persian Gulf and central and north-east Africa, consists of practices and rituals of placation with which a category of spirits known as zâr and referred to as winds are warded off from a victim. The article, in particular, aims at offering an accurate description of the sub-lexicon associated with zâr in local Hormozgâni dialects, an aspect of research which has not been taken into consideration up to now.