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.

I do not offer these notes for perusal in the idea that they communicate any thing very new, neither do I suppose that from their contents can be elicited any thing likely to be of solid benefit to the more enlightened agriculturist of Great Britain; as little do I fancy that they can possess even a tithe of the interest which must attach to a detailed description of the careful cultivation practised by the industrious Chinese husbandman. Still, I deem it possible, that they may in some points not be destitute of interest:

1st. As showing that the agriculture of India is not altogether of so rude or slovenly a character as it is often supposed to be.

2nd. That many of the means and instruments used, albeit simple, are yet well adapted to attain the end in view.

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.

This article investigates the growth of cross-border movement and migration in the northern portion of the Yellow Sea during the sixteenth century, which generated ongoing interactions and tensions with the coastal governance of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China. The fluid flow of private seafarers reconnected the northern Yellow Sea and revitalised its maritime economy, making this space an integral part of wider trade networks. Meanwhile, the Chosŏn and Ming authorities also attempted to discern, categorise, and institutionalise this transmarine mobility in their discursive, administrative, and geographic spaces. Instead of considering the two polities as land based and inward looking, this article foregrounds the dynamics of their coastal control mechanisms, while at the same time paying close attention to their constraints on filtering and scrutinising maritime violence.

Three archival photographs recently made public by the French National Library depict men associated with an event taking place in colonial Laos around 1920. However, upon examination of the pictures and textual sources, combined with contemporaneous documents, it turns out that the pictures are actually from Tonkin (colonial northern Vietnam) and may depict Batchai (Pa Chay Vue) a celebrated Hmong messiah in 1918 when he met with colonial authorities in an ultimate negotiation attempt before launching a four-year rebellion. Batchai famously led a violent revolt against Tai and French power in Tonkin and Laos between 1918 and 1921, which has been documented in French military reports. No photograph has ever been found of the rebel leader and his supporters and this find in itself would be of significance, especially for the Hmong diaspora in the West for whom Pa Chay Vue has achieved near-mythical status as a major folk hero. This article examines whether or not this is him; but beyond the simple task of identification, it proposes interpretations for the events that suggest a more complex affair than French military archives have ever been willing to tell, including the hypothesis of an administrative cover up.

The formation of the future tense is often mentioned in discussions on the classification of the modern Indo-Aryan languages. An -s- type of future occurs in Gujarati, Lahnda, and Jaipuri, an -h- type of future exists side by side with participial formations in Marwari, Hindi (Braj), and Bundeli, and in Bhojpuri and Awadhi (in the third persons only), as well as in Kashmiri, where it has assumed the meaning of a past conditional. Despite this Marwari belongs to the -s- group, forms with -h- being found in those dialects of Marwari that regularly have voiceless -h- < -s-. The explanation of the Kashmiri forms is similar (ś > h and -ṣy- > -śś- > -h- in Kashmiri). Thus -s- forms in principle are found over a large part of the North-West and West of India. Attempts have been made to trace back the modern conditions to earlier stages, and S. Sen claims that the two types of future go back to different Indo-European originals: “From early times there were dialectal forms with the base-affix -ha-, which became quite dominant in Apabhraṃśa.” (This is incorrect.) “The origin seems to have been the I.E. stem affix *-so-, OIA. -sa-, occurring in the desiderative, the aorist, and as a root-determinative.” The accepted opinion is that the two types of future have the same origin, the OIA. future suffix -i-ṣya-, and that differentiation did not take place till the Middle Indo-Aryan period. As has been shown conclusively by Turner and by Bloch, the future suffix of Sanskrit could have in MIA. a special development into -h- instead of -ss- which is phonetically regular, because it was in a weak position, being a terminational element.

Pyo and jātaka. A considerable proportion of the corpus of Burmese literature consists of translations or adaptations from Buddhist texts in Pali. Some works are prose translations, but Pali texts also formed a basis for verse, particularly in the type of poem called “pyo”. There are a few pyo which merely enumerate precepts for virtuous conduct, and a small number dealing with secular subjects, but the majority narrate an episode from the Buddha's life or re-tell one of the jātakas. These are not exact translations: pyo have been described as written “by extracting suitable stories from the life of the Buddha and the jātakas, which are found in the Buddhist scriptures, and embellishing them in Burmese verse”, as “embellished translations”, and as “ornate translations”.

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.

Since their first publication in 1922, two Islamic inscriptions formed an essential basis of the early history of Islam in Champa. Recently, however, they have been shown to have originated, not from Southeast Asia, but from Tunisia. It is clear that either there was an error regarding their provenance, or it was deliberately falsified. The implications of this are discussed, and the remaining evidence of early Islamic presence in Champa is reassessed. It is suggested that there is now no good evidence of any Islamic presence there until after the sixteenth century. In relation to this issue, the maritime links between China and the Islamic world are examined, as also are other examples of possible falsification of history.

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.

According to recent research, after the Song dynasty, there was a transformation of the political culture in imperial China according to which Confucian elites and dynastic rulers ceased to construct political legitimacy by interpreting prophecies. By examining the process of how Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty, utilized a popular prophecy and how he concealed his utilization of this prophecy after enthronement, this article offers a more nuanced narrative of the transformation. It shows that during the Yuan-Ming transition, rulers sought to employ prophecies to construct their image as sovereigns favoured by Heaven, but, ironically, in official writings rulers tended to hide their utilization of prophecies so as to highlight their virtues which deserved the Mandate of Heaven. This article argues that after the Song, the role of prophecies changed in the political arena—not from important to unimportant, but from officially recognized to officially concealed.

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.