This article discusses a story that has enjoyed a long life in scholarly literature, drama, and the visual arts: the alleged caging of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I Yildirim (r. 1389–1402) by the Central Asian conqueror, Temür (r. 1370–1405). Attention is focused on the evolution of scholarly discourse on the existence (or otherwise) of the cage. The period from the late seventeenth to the first half of the twentieth century is looked at in particular detail. The debate around the captivity of Bayezid is only fully understood when it is located within a larger historical framework, namely the changing political relationships between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the nineteenth century.

The issue of the purchase of land in one country, in this case Iran, by other countries, in this case Britain and Russia, is one of great significance because of light it may throw on the strength or weakness of national sovereignty, and the ways and degree to which it may be undermined. It can also show the strategies deployed by the country challenged to protect its territorial integrity, as here in the case of Iran. The intricacies of foreign landownership patterns thus have implications for international relations, on which they can provide telling detail in terms of contemporary power politics. The details of land purchase also demonstrate considerable differences as between the two outside powers involved in terms of their objectives in Iran, and thus challenge a tendency in the literature to see them as similar.

Great is the importance of names in literature. For modern audiences, good names are an important and enjoyable part of the experience of reading, and many authors have delighted their readers with new creations or especially apposite matches – one could cite examples as varied as J. K. Rowling (Malfoy, Dumbledore, Snape), Aldous Huxley (Tantamount, Burlap, Spandrill), Charles Dickens (Pickwick, Sweedlepipe, Honeythunder), Andrea Camilleri (Catarella, Montalbano, Boneti-Alderighi), or Franz Kafka (K.).

ʿAbdallāh ibn Sabaʾ is a figure generally regarded as Islam's first heretic by Sunnī scholars and also vilified by Shīʿī scholars. In this article an anonymous, esoteric work known as Umm al-Kitāb is examined as it contains an exceptional narrative that adopts a strikingly sympathetic approach to Ibn Sabaʾ. It is also argued that the work's unique take on the Ibn Sabaʾ legend sheds considerable light on the date and elusive provenance of this early Shīʿī text.

The rediscovery, conservation and repositioning of an ancient stone carved Buddha in Leh, Ladakh is one of the most important events in recent years for students of early Tibetan history and religion. Uncovering an inscription next to the carving has made it possible to date this artefact to the eleventh century or even earlier, while deciphering the inscription has confirmed that the figure should be identified as the Buddha Maitreya. This identification permits a better understanding of how the cult of Maitreya among of the emperors of imperial Tibet extended to western Tibet, and how the Maitreya images of western Tibet represent a specific local iconography.

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.

The last fifty years mark a period of great change in the role of religious leadership and education in the Sultanate of Oman. The country moved from bifurcated leadership between an Imam and a Sultan to a single political authority. These decades also witnessed the modernisation of the state. These factors combined to reshape the place of religion and religious education in society. Whereas previously religious leaders had relative autonomy and more direct political influence, now they were brought under the auspices of the government with their focus circumscribed to religious matters. The structures and foci of religious education were then reshaped so that tradition provided a platform for progress and the more zealous ideologies emerging in the region could be held at bay. This has permitted Oman to modernise and engage with a global society in an amicable, non-sectarian, manner.

The purpose of this article is to relate a remarkable episode involving Nader Shah's navy and to connect it directly to the wider aims and projects of his regime (notably his ambitions in India), and the central events of his reign. In this way his Persian Gulf policy may emerge not as the oddity it might at first appear, but rather as a consistent element in a coherent larger whole.

Placing Tipu Sultan of Mysore's personal dream register in its textual and historical contexts reveals an internal logic to its structure and content that scholars have not previously recognised. An analysis of the manuscript as a whole suggests that it was compiled no earlier than 1795, as part of a range of strategies adopted by Tipu to ameliorate the position in which he found himself in the late 1790s. Isolated by his regional contemporaries and under increasing pressure from the British, he drew on a range of divinatory practices in an attempt to understand, and perhaps even influence, the outcome of events.

This article examines four important turning points (1952, 1961, 1982 and 2000) in Pakistan's history. In each case, the government of the day, faced with serious challenges, solicited/received advice from the bureaucratic leadership. In each case, the latter placed before the former options that, though often different from conventional wisdom or popular prescriptions, offered real hope of a long-term solution to some of Pakistan's problems. And on each occasion, this advice was rejected or ignored by the politicians, arguably at great cost to the country and to its rulers. This article employs a historian's hindsight and argues that at key points in Pakistan's history the bureaucratic leadership did what it was supposed to – provide sound advice based on empirical appreciation of Pakistan's predicament and the enlightened self-interest of the government. Today, it is widely perceived that Pakistan's senior civil servants do not even bother to advise the politicians in power. Indeed, Pakistan's crisis of state cannot be overcome unless the esprit de corps and professional integrity of the civil service are rebuilt. The consequences of failure on this front are so greatly negative for the entire region that focused and sustained efforts are needed to rehabilitate Pakistan's bureaucratic leadership.

Scholars of Indo-European historical linguistics have long found it convenient to refer to well known sound changes by the name of the researcher who first noticed the correspondences the sound change accounts for. Because of the proven utility of such named sound laws in Indo-European linguistics, the explicit listing and naming of sound laws in the Tibeto-Burman family could be expected to bring similar benefits.

The Sunni tradition of the ninth and tenth centuries often reports Muslims from the seventh and eighth centuries so fearful of God and the Last Judgement that they wished they had never been born, wept uncontrollably, and otherwise carried on as we seldom hear of from later centuries. My first object is therefore to make out what these fearers were up to. To look forward, I would characterise the piety on display as being intensely ascetical. It is about insecurity and divine transcendence, not trust and nearness to God. The fearers seem to have cultivated anxiousness to maintain their devotion and prevent complacency. My second object is to make out why such exaggerated fear evidently faded away in the later eighth century. I tend to think that fear had to be moderated with the development of Sunni theology in the ninth century, which made it necessary to stress the prospect of salvation for all Muslims, and of a Sunni piety that eschewed extreme practices unsuitable for everyone to undertake.

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.

The transformation of cities in the Byzantine and early Islamic Near East was discussed by a number of scholars in the last century. Many of them adopted a traditional approach, claiming that the Islamic conquest caused the total collapse of large classical cities, turning them into small medieval towns. The urban landscape was changed dramatically, with the large colonnaded streets of the classical Polis transformed into the narrow allies of the Islamic Madina.

This article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.

The East India Company began to establish lending libraries for soldiers at its stations in India from about 1891 and, by the early 1830s, the majority of those responsible for the day-to-day operation of these institutions were keen to stress their beneficial effect upon the readers who frequented them. In a series of reports that were written at this time station chaplains and commanding officers emphasised that reading was having a positive effect upon the men's behaviour. What also emerges from these reports is evidence of a contemporary belief that the ‘setting’ in which reading took place determined the degree to which the activity was beneficial.

Comparative writing about the history of science and technology in different cultures tends to assume that differences in the ways in which these cultures write their histories are not important. But this is unlikely to be the case. The comparative lack of historical writing about printing in China by European standards should not in itself lead us to conclude that print only played a minor role there, any more than the tendency to downplay the importance of paper among historians of the European book means that its use in Europe was less significant than in other cultures. That in China the relative balance of the historical record is the opposite of the one that we tend to assume on the basis of the European experience is demonstrated here by contrasting the dearth of information about early printing with the commemoration even of relatively marginal cultural figures through the traditional Chinese historiography of paper making. But only tentative suggestions can be made as to why these differences in historical writing may have occurred.

The ritual use of objects and images designed to serve as effigies or surrogates of specific persons, animals or spirits is more or less universal across cultures and time. In Tibet, recent archaeological evidence attests to the use of illustrated effigies possibly dating from the eleventh century. Other early Tibetan images include anthropomorphic figures inscribed on animal skulls. The practical use of effigies in Tibetan ritual, both Buddhist and Bon-po, was almost certainly derived from much older Indian practices transmitted to Tibet. In this article illustrated effigies, their iconography and ritual use are discussed and the article concludes with the translation and transliteration of a short work by the fifteenth-century treasure revealer (gter-ston) and patron saint of Bhutan Padma-gling-pa (1450–1521), which gives instructions on how to draw a liṅga for a ritual of defence against human adversaries.

This study examines in detail the biographical entry of an Ilkhanid (the Mongol state centred in Iran) princess, El Qutlugh Khatun daughter of Abagha Ilkhan (r. 1265–82), in the biographical dictionaries of the Mamluk author Khalīl ibn Aybeg al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363). Al-Ṣafadī‘s biography of the lady provides a rare glance into the life of women of the Mongol royal household during the transitional period which followed the Ilkhanid conversion to Islam. It sheds light on issues such as the relations between the Mamluks and the Ilkhans in light of the latter's conversion to Islam and the influence of the process of Islamization on traditional Mongolian gender related practices. This paper also discusses the motivation of the Mamluk author in including El Qutlugh's unusual story in his biographical dictionaries showing how his choices might have been influenced not only by his own interests but also by what appealed to his readers.