Romanisation has not been studied from a comparative perspective so far, although there are a number of case studies that focus on particular speech communities. In order to fill this gap in the literature, the articles in this special issue were first presented at a workshop, entitled “Romanisation in Comparative Perspective: Explaining Success and Failure”, held at Bilkent University, Ankara, 5–6 September 2007. The workshop addressed this theme with the specific aim of explaining why romanisation has been implemented successfully in certain cases and why it has failed in others. Hailing from diverse disciplines, workshop participants brought together a variety of methodological approaches, which represented a challenge and an opportunity at the same time. Each participant reassessed the story of a success or failure within the socio-political and historical context of a particular country or region.

During the reign of Patriarch Timothy I (780–823), the Church of the East continued to expand into Asia. Metropolitans were consecrated for various places to the east of the Patriarchal see in Baghdad. One of these was the enigmatic Metropolitan of the Turks, about whose location scholars have disagreed for decades. This article seeks to answer the question “Which Turks received the Metropolitan appointed by Timothy?” by systematically examining the different Turkic groups living in Central Asia at the time. Textual and archaeological evidence is considered in support of the conclusion and the various motives and external factors that may have played a role in the conversion are discussed.

The reconstruction of the library of Eastern medieval Jewish scholars and medical practitioners according to the Cairo Genizah is a long-term project. In the course of the work a Judaeo-Arabic fragment of a unique tabular medical book by Ibn Biklārish (T-S Ar.44.218) was identified by the authors of this article.

The fragment is unique in several respects, particularly (a) very few medieval Arabic tabular medical works are known, (b) only few works by Andalusian Jewish authors of the late 11th or early 12th century have been found in the Genizah so far, (c) only one Judaeo-Arabic fragment of Ibn Biklārish's Kitāb al-Mustaʿīnī is known to date.

The main importance of our find is that it is the first time that a rare Spanish medical book has appeared in the Cairo Genizah collection. Dozens of the Genizah's fragments have been identified as medical books, but none by a Spanish Jewish author, written in Judaeo-Arabic, and tabulated!

Arabic biographical writing is much used as a historical source, and scholars agree that its textuality must be taken into account in evaluating its content. There is less agreement, though, on the importance of thoroughly understanding the range of processes of literary composition used by biographers. This article approaches three sets of biographies from a purely literary viewpoint: two medieval sketches of women, a Sufi and a songstress respectively; three seventeenth-century hagiographies of the physician and theosopher Dāwud al-Anṭākī; and a thirteenth-century portrait of one man of letters, al-Qifṭī, by another, Yāqūt. It concludes that the art and care devoted to shaping such commemorations of individuals is evidence of the aesthetic and cultural importance of biography as an Arabic literary genre.

In this article the author presents an overview of the British Library's Manichaean Turkish text fragments (written in Runic, Manichaean and Sogdo-Uigur script). Besides information on all fragments published so far several pieces of a confession text on the Blessed Small Feast Day are edited in full and compared to parallels in other collections.

This article criticises the conventional interpretation of the first English translation of the Qing penal code by George Thomas Staunton, and proposes a different reading that stresses its role in promoting a positive image of the legal order in Canton on behalf of the East India Company. It suggests that in viewing the translation as a product of growing confrontation between two incompatible legal and cultural systems, our historical literature has radically diminished the scope of Staunton's comparative enterprise and his method of translation. Not only did Staunton exploit contemporary debates on penal reform to emphasise practical arrangements which overlapped across Chinese and British jurisdictions, he more importantly sought to valorise the Company's role in maintaining the jurisdictional status quo in what was patently an unstable and hybrid legal environment in Canton. However, the latter prerogative promoted a flattering and partial conception of jurisdictional ambiguity in Canton. It elided the Company's role in proliferating instability in Canton, and presented legal accommodation as a unilateral concession by the Qing from the severity of their own laws. This article addresses the intimate connections between the pluralist and pragmatic aspects of Staunton's project. It shows how, even though its pluralism has been forgotten, its pragmatic conceits concerning the origins of extraterritoriality have left a lasting impact on the historiography of Sino-Western relations.

This paper explores the varied reactions of the Turkish literati and intelligentsia to the adoption of the Roman script imposed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1928. Though alphabet reform had been on the agenda for almost 75 years, few intellectuals and bureaucrats had been supportive of romanisation in the years preceding the move. However after the implementation of the reform, opponents remained silent or were seemingly converted. This article discusses the reasons behind the silence and conversion of the elites and the strategies of opposition developed by more radical defenders of the Ottoman script. Finally it records the impact of the reform on the literary world and literary historiography.

In post-revolution Iran, the sacred notion of martyrdom has been transformed into a routine act of government – a moral sign of order and state sovereignty. Moving beyond the debates of the secularisation of the sacred and the making sacred of the secular, this article argues that the moment of sacralisation is realised through co-production within a social setting when the object of sacralisation is recognised as such by others. In contemporary Iran, however, the moment of sacralising bodies by the state is also the moment of its own subversion as the political-theological field of martyrdom is contested and challenged from within. This article traces the genealogy of martyrdom in contemporary Iran in order to explore its institutionalised forms and governmental practices. During the revolution, the Shi'a tradition of martyrdom and its dramatic performances of ritual mourning and self-sacrifice became central to the mass mobilisation against the monarchy. Once the revolutionary government came into existence, this sacred tradition was regulated to create ‘martyrs’ as a fixed category, in order to consolidate the legacy of the revolution. In this political theatre, the dead body is a site of transformation and performance upon which the original narrative of martyrdom takes place even as it displaces it and gives new meanings to the act.

This paper investigates the nature of the British and Foreign Bible Society's (BFBS) patronage of the translation of the Chinese Union Versions (CUVs), the largest Chinese Protestant Bible translation project initiated by the western Protestant churches in the nineteenth century. Drawing on André Lefevere's concept of patronage, it delves into how the BFBS served as a controlling factor of the translation of the CUV by examining the BFBS's financial support to the translation project, conferment of honorary titles to the translators and ideological influence on the translators’ choice of Greek text as the basis for the CUVs New Testament translation.

Patronage by the royal court of religious institutions and foundations is one of the hallmarks of the development of India under the rule of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka kings (4th–5th centuries). This patronage was extended also to religious movements other than the king's own persuasion. The evolving culture of religious tolerance and enthusiasm is apparent in the temple monuments of the time. In this article we focus on four archeological sites where these developments become best visible: Udayagiri, Māṇḍhaḷ, Rāmagiri (Ramtek), and Mansar. The close relationship of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka realms is investigated in its local settings. Renewed attention is given to the ‘Mandhal Inscription, Year 5’ of the Vākāṭaka king Rudrasena II and the deity on whose authority the charter was issued: Muṇḍasvāmin. It is argued that the name Muṇḍa refers to no one else than the Gupta queen of Rudrasena II, Prabhāvatī Guptā. During the last decade, excavations in Mansar (5 km west of Ramtek) have brought to light the state sanctuary of the youngest son of Prabhāvatī, Pravarasena II. The findings there are placed within the tradition that can be traced back, through Rāmagiri and Māṇḍhaḷ, to the religious foundations in Udayagiri.

Like other elements of culture, alphabets have both practical and ethnopolitical integrating or differentiating significance. Hence, any alphabet change has serious political implications. This article will briefly consider the process of romanisation undertaken in the six newly independent Muslim states that were part of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan); and then evaluate its success or failure and attempt to explain the causes for these phenomena.

This article describes in detail the beginning of aviation in Egypt, with special reference to the Great Week of Aviation at Heliopolis in 1910, and the effect of this new technology on Egyptians. With the exception of a few flights in North Africa made by French pilots in late 1909, it also describes the first flights in the Arab world. Based primarily on contemporary Egyptian Arabic newspapers, it recounts how a group of colonial entrepreneurs sponsored a great aviation meeting at Heliopolis in order to promote their development of the ‘Oasis of Heliopolis’, or ‘Ayn Shams/Misr al-Jadida, as a new suburb of Cairo. The article focuses on the concept for the meeting, the first flights in Egypt before the meeting, the promotion of the meeting, and the international competitors and their performances. It then summarises the consequences of the meeting for aviation in general, aviation in Egypt – including the reaction of Egyptians to aviation – and the development of Heliopolis.

The problem tackled in this article is ambitious. Through examination of how certain fundamental teachings of the Buddha originated – the author argues that those teachings must indeed go back to the Buddha himself. Thus the author builds a chain of argument which creates hypothetical links rather than declaring ‘a priori’ that links and connection cannot be established.

This article argues that the Alagaddūpama Sutta, an important early Buddhist text, portrays the Buddha in the process of formulating his thoughts. If so it contradicts the myth that the Buddha awakened to the entire Buddhist Dharma on one occasion, and should be dated to the fourth century bce. Such an antiquity, and peculiar didactic structure suggests that the text contains authentic teachings of the Buddha.

One of the features of the Gupta-Vākāṭaka age is the growth of Śaivism. In this article some of the epigraphical evidence for this process is assembled and discussed. While the direct evidence for the adoption of Śiva worship among the Guptas is limited to ministers of the Gupta court, it is clear that the Vākāṭaka kings were predominantly Māheśvaras. New fragmentary wall inscriptions uncovered from Mansar, the site of Pravarasena II's palace, hint at a possible connection with the teachings of the Śvetāśvatara-Upaniṣad. Two post-Gupta inscriptions from the area around Mandasor are discussed in the light of a tendency towards religious hierarchisation, an attitude which came to be increasingly characteristic of early medieval Śaivism. In the second part attention is drawn to the variety of Pāśupata and Māheśvara worship in the Gupta-Vākāṭaka age, as well as to the trifold organisation of the Pāśupata movement. The article ends with a note on the interaction with non-Śaiva traditions, in particular Buddhism, and its possible impact upon the formation of the Pāśupata movement.

Writing systems are used as, and considered to be, important tools and symbols of political discourses of their time. This article presents a historical overview of the alphabet changes in Azerbaijan and shows how the alphabets were associated with the discourses of modernisation, nationalism and national identity construction. In the early twentieth century, the discussion on the need to shift from the Arabic alphabet to the Roman was actually an extension of the wider debate on national identity and language coupled with the will to modernise and progress. In 1940, the Soviet regime imposed the shift from the Roman alphabet to the Cyrillic in a top-down manner. This change was neither negotiated nor discussed among the intellectuals and there was almost no room for the expression of critical views. With the introduction of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, intellectuals started to question to what extent the Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian language could represent the Azerbaijani language, civilisation, and national identity. In 1991, Azerbaijan adopted the Roman alphabet. The case of Azerbaijan shows that alphabet changes are symbolic acts to deny and/or reject the previous political and cultural heritage and its legitimacy and tools for undermining its prominence in the new processes of transformation and change.

The overwhelming importance of Kurdish, both language and literature, in Turkish Kurdistan has tended to push all other languages into the background, though some of them are spoken by large and important populations. Zazaki and its literature is one of these that has received far less attention than it deserves, many educated people outside of Turkish Kurdistan being hardly aware of its existence. In this article I have presented the content of fragments from a new Zazaki source. These fragments were fortunately preserved in the binding cover of an old book, which seems to give us at least one of the neglected sources from which the Zazaki writers drew, and carries us back into the memories and the doctrines of the Zazaki community. It has great value as a document of the history of Alevism in Eastern Anatolia.

The Rev. Dr A.A. Führer lived to the age of seventy-seven. Herein is examined his first forty years. Trained as an Oriental Linguist, Führer eventually found employment as a field archaeologist. Three years after his appointment, the Archaeological Survey of India entered the worst crisis of its existence. Führer reacted in ways incompatible with scholarly integrity. It remains to be seen whether he committed further transgressions and or forgeries during his final thirty-seven years.

The aim of this article is to describe and explain multiple processes of alphabet reform and romanisation with which Uzbekistan has experimented since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. These reforms, which were debated and implemented in different socio-political and cultural contexts, illustrate essentially different stages of political development and experiences. While in the past reformers tended toward more complicated and rapid reforms, today the scope of change is much more modest and we meet with changes which are simpler and extended over the long term.

Both interdenominational co-operation and denominational competition featured in the Protestant missionary literary enterprise in nineteenth-century China. The interdenominational Religious Tract Society in London became the most vital link between the missionary translators, printing presses and target audiences in the production, publication and distribution of Christian tracts. Ideally, interdenominational missions would pool resources and promote cooperation among missionaries with different denominational affiliations. Doctrinal disputes, however, seem to have been inevitable among them in the everyday operation of missions. The first tract committee established in China, the Shanghai Tract Committee in the 1840s is a case in point. Unequal denominational representation resulted in heated doctrinal controversies and the resignation of a Committee member over the publication of a problematic tract in Chinese.