Professor Athar Ali (born 18 January 1925) studied at Aligarh Muslim University 1948–53. His PhD studies were supervised by Professor Satish Chandra. In 1953 he was appointed research assistant at the university and became a Professor in 1978. He was Wilson Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute in 1986, Smuts Fellow, Cambridge, 1974–5 a nd President of the Indian History Congress in 1989. His major publications are The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Aligarh, 1966) and The Apparatus of Empire (Delhi, 1985). Sadly he died not long after this article was accepted for publication and was therefore unable to see it in print.

In attempting to write a religious and political history of Ḥaḍramawt in the Middle Ages one inevitably encounters a number of methodological and historiographical problems some of which will be addressed in the present article. The first arises from the overall scarcity of historical documentation on the period in question. More importantly, the sources that are available are riddled with underlying agendas and biases, which often hinge on considerations of genealogy and clannish honour. These genealogical or clannish agendas and biases are evident in the sources dealing with practically every aspect of Ḥaḍrami history. However, they are especially conspicuous in the historical texts which describe the spread of the Shāfi'ī school of law in Ḥaḍramawt, the cult of local saints and the origins of local religious and educational institutions. In my recent study of Ḥaḍramī shrines and seasonal pilgrimages, I have brought out the genealogical underpinnings of the theological polemic around the cult of local holy men and women - a polemic that grew especially intense in the first decades of our century and flared up with a vengeance during the recent civil war between the Northern and Southern parts of unified Yemen. In this paper I will demonstrate how these hidden agendas have manifested themselves in the historical accounts of Ḥaḍramī Islam with special reference to the rise of the Shāfi'ī madhhab and the dissemination of Ṣūfism.

The career and scholarship of Edward William Lane, the renowned Orientalist and Arabic lexicographer, have been closely described and evaluated. His life is soon to be the subject of a further study, one planned by Jason Thompson. It may therefore be opportune to take a look at a modest cache of letters in Arabic, both addressed to and written by Lane, which is held in the Griffith Institute at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. These letters were deposited, along with a manuscript version of Lane's unpublished Description of Egypt and other papers and drawings, by his great-great-nephew, Austin Lane Poole, in 1947.

Is Viṣṇu Naṭarāja? yes, according to the (Vaiṣṇava saints of the Tamil country) Viṣṇu is Naṭaraja. The pan-Indian tradition associates two important forms of Viṣṇu with dance. They are Kāliyamardana and rāśaknḍa, merry making sports of Kṣīs. According to the Cilappatikāram (Kaṭalāṭukātai 11. 37–63) Viṣṇu presents mal while fighting with a demon, alliyam (a group dance) at the time rendition of KaṆsa, kuṭam as Trivikrama, pēṆi as the eunuch Kāmadeva, an aspect of Viṣṇu, and pāvai is performed by Tiru, Śrīdevī, consort of Viṣṇu. This seems to be an ancient tradition (c. 5th century A. D.), reiterated by the . The are Vaiṣṇava mystics of the Tamil bhakti age, in total twelve in number. They have contributed enormously to literature, grouped under the heading, Nālāyiratiwiyapirapantam “4000 Melodious Hymns” (cf. Hardy 1983: 247–50; Settar 1993: 223–40; Kalidos 1993: 181–88). The twelve are authors of 24 literary pieces, dated during the 5th–9th centuries A.D. The are grouped under three chronological heads as follows:

The opening line of Abu'l Faẓl's notice in Ā'īn-i Akbarī on “top” (gunpowder artillery) describes it as “a wonderful lock (qufl-i shiqarf) for securing the august edifice of royalty (iqbāl sarā-i jahānbānī) and a key (kulīd-i dilkushā) to the door of conquest (darwāza-i kishwarsitānī)” He then proceeds to claim that except for the Mediterranean/Ottoman territories (Rūmistān), in no other place was gunpowder artillery available in such abundance as in the Mughal Empire. These statements cannot be brushed aside as simple rhetoric. On the contrary, they may well be perceived as reflecting the significance gunpowder artillery had come to acquire with regard to two important matters, namely, (a) strengthening of central authority and (b) rapid military conquests leading to the annexation of vast territories.

In his influential work, Max Weber argued that the Middle East was fatally hampered in the development of a modern civil society by the existence of arbitrary Qadi justice, based on the personalized decisions of a judiciary reliant only on case law for precedent and lacking any form of rational organization. This individualistic judicial structure (or lack of structure) allowed authoritarian regimes to subvert the courts for their own purposes, destroying the possibility of the development of an autonomous citizenry; meanwhile, in Europe the evolution of a rationally codified legal system acted as a check on governmental tyranny and provided a space for the evolution of independent civic organizations.

Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole is considered to fall within the group of Indo-Portuguese Creoles, which were Portuguese-based Creoles that once flourished around coastal India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole arose when the Portuguese established trading posts and fortresses in Sri Lanka from 1517 onwards. The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the influence of substratum (indigenous) languages on Sri Lanka Portuguese Creole.

We do not know a lot about the exact sources of the Pāli manuscript collection kept today in the Royal Asiatic Society. Records are very few and scattered here and there in the publications of the Society. Mentions of donors or vendors of the Pāli MSS. collected since 1825 are not at all detailed: most of the time there are no titles, no sufficient material description, no measurements, not even naming the exact language or the script, no register numbers or shelfmarks; we are just told about the name of the donor, or conditions of the sale, the date of acquisition (but not the date of the MS.), sometimes place or circumstances of acquisition.

Five manuscripts from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St. Petersburg contain compositions which are connected in one way or another with the name of the outstanding medieval astronomer and astrologer Abū Ma‘shar Balī (born in Bali on AH 20 Safar 171/10 August 787 AD, died at Wasef on AH 29 Ramazan 272/9 March 886 AD).2 According to existing catalogues these five manuscripts are the only ones among those kept in the city collections that contain Abū Ma‘shar's works.

Arjuna is in many ways the central character of the Mahābhārata, the great Sanskrit epic. By order of birth he is the third among the Pāṇḍavas, the five sons of Pānḍu, who represent the forces of cosmic order. When, after humiliation and exile, the Pānḍ;avas finally triumph, primogeniture prevails, and it is the eldest brother, Yudhisfhira, who takes the throne; but in other respects, Arjuna is usually a more salient figure than his dutiful eldest brother. Thus it is to Arjuna that Krishna addresses his teaching in the Bhagavad Gitā (part of Book 6 of the Epic). Moreover although Pānḍu is pater to the five brothers, each has his own divine genitor, and the genitor of Arjuna is Indra, king of the gods in the classical pantheon. A paper about Arjuna is a paper about a major figure in Hindu tradition.

“Influence-research” is not a field to itself. It boasts no experts. Where cultures are sources of national or professional prestige the Einflussforsche's task can be thankless. Cultures are admired as self-consistent, and if possible original. Where indebtedness is notorious – e.g. East Asian artefacts’ effects on European taste – research into it may be conducted without grief. But since unacknowledged indebtedness affronts the increasing specialization of our times tentative disclosures may be accused of implausibility. One is asked “How could such a thing happen?rdquo;, and “What does it add up to?” Learned journals have published many strange “parallels”. Effects are cumulative: quum singula non prosunt multa iuvant. News, for example, that famous stories have migrated over great distances causes no apprehension. But where anomalies bring distant, even antagonistic cultures into confrontation, without a proved contact, one may become impatient. “Influence-research” remains the Cinderella of the sciences, and she has plenty of Ugly Sisters. One may take a trivial example. Judaism has for centuries presented rabbinism as its normative model; and then news accumulated that Yahweh was once seen as a manifestation of Apollo, with an accompanying osmosis from pagan towards Jewish symbols and fashions. This flouting of the standard set by the sensational Maccabees books put the results, such as they were, under a cloud.

The genealogical seal of the Mughal emperors of India was one of the most potent symbols of Mughal imperial authority. The distinctive design of the seal - a central circle containing the name of the ruling emperor, surrounded by a series of smaller circles, like satellites in orbit, containing the names of his ancestors up to Timūr (1336–1405) each preceded by the filiative ibn - was a self-evident masterpiece of imperial symbolism, in which the authority of the ruling emperor was both legitimised and enhanced by the deliberate reference to his illustrious ancestors. The inscription was designed to be read starting with the ruling emperor's name in the middle, then moving into the outer circle to the name of his immediate predecessor (at 1 o'clock) and, continuing clockwise, finishing up at Timur, who always had pride of place at the top of the seal. In this way, each ruler was expressed as the son of his predecessor, while at the same time, from his central position abutting all the smaller circles, the ruling emperor could be read symbolically as the “son” of each of his ancestors.