The story of Imam Husain's martyrdom at Karbala has been told with variant emphases and interpretations in different historical contexts. This article examines one of the most famous modern tellings of this narrative: that of ‘Ali Naqi Naqvi, arguably South Asia's most influential Shi‘i mujtahid of the twentieth century. It argues that, from the 1930s–1940s, ‘Ali Naqi pioneered a novel perspective on Imam Husain, establishing him as a model for human comportment and a figure to be actively emulated, both by Shi‘as and by humanity at large. As well as having implications for transformation within Shi‘ism, this reorientation of Husain's significance pre-empted its politicisation: ‘Ali Naqi's message informed the incorporation of Shi‘i symbology within the 1942 Quit India agitation, and in some senses exhibited parallels with the later revolutionary rendering of the Karbala message in 1960s–1970s Iran. It is the range of the religious and political implications to be drawn from Ali Naqi's interpretation that have ensured both the durability, and ongoing controversy, of his Husainology.

The present paper examines the growth of corruption in Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s with particular emphasis on the factors that influenced changes in the behavioural norms of the officer cadres or higher bureaucracy of Pakistan. The main argument is that during the 1960s increases in development spending and the manipulation of local governments by civil servants to help the Ayub Khan military regime secure legitimacy led to a substantial increase in the level of corruption. However, while the increase was alarming, the higher bureaucracy was still fairly clean and, given leadership, training and resources, in a position to contain the spread of corruption. In the 1970s the first Pakistan People's Party government enacted a number of reforms aimed at asserting political control over the civilian bureaucracy while pursuing a socialistic development model that justified nationalisation of industrial and commercial assets. These substantially undermined the ability of the higher bureaucracy to fight back against corruption while dramatically increasing state penetration of society and the economy, thus making opportunities for corruption more abundant. After General Zia-ul Haq's military coup in July 1977, the new regime, though it received plenty of good advice, was not interested in enhancing the autonomy and prestige of the services as that would diminish Zia's personal power over the state apparatus.

Taking the example of the Ismaʻilis in colonial South Asia and East Africa, this article examines some aspects of the complexities involved in the identity formation of communities seeking gradual redefinitions in a deterritorialised global context, reformulating notions of community membership in the process. The Ismaʻili case illustrates an intertwined history of the development of community identity, and a language of social service that became the hallmark of the community under a religious leadership that virtually redefined its position through a vigorous and increasing emphasis on the idiom of social commitment. At one level, this thrust marks a passage from the translocal to the global context, intelligible in terms of the conceptual rubric of global assemblages. At another level, the article also seeks to evaluate the nature of the community's diasporic experience in Africa. It suggests that the ideational framework and praxis of social service — and in more recent times grander developmental endeavours addressing the needs of both Ismaʻilis and non-Ismaʻilis across the world — both reflect, and are mutually constitutive of, more fundamental experiments with identity and repositioning of religious authority that the Ismaʻilis first witnessed in colonial South Asia and East Africa. This article is thus an effort to retrieve some of the continuities and ruptures in the historical process.

In 1950 this journal published Charles Boxer's description of the Codex that bears his name and is now in the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. In this article I shed light on a number of questions about the volume that he left unanswered. The plan of the essay is as follows. First, I recapitulate the nature, composition and contents of the Codex, and its associations with Chinese artists. Next, I turn to evidence that the explorer Quíros saw the manuscript in the court in Madrid no later than 1610; in particular I compare the text of his Summary relation with part of the Boxer Codex. Finally, an examination of the binding shows the Codex was only bound in Madrid, strongly suggesting how and when it got to Spain.

This article explores Islamic networks, as constituted by migration of people, movement of saints and philanthropic institutional links, across the Indian Ocean. Linking Bombay, Hyderabad and the Muslim diasporas of East Africa, these transnational Shi‘i networks forge a print-based public sphere and determine routes for the circulation of media technology. Moreover, this article argues, that they deploy this technology to enable Islamic reformism in ways that are distinct to the local urban cultures in which they are set. The article examines two initiatives that apply technology towards different conceptions of Shi‘i reformism: while one reform initiative attempts to situate itself within a secular liberal public, another seeks to interrogate secular liberal assumptions by establishing an authentic Islamic society; both then, are underpinned by different goals, internal contestations and diverse trajectories. This article seeks to emphasize the ongoing impact of historically shaped networks of community migration and organisation: both the use of technology in mediating Islamic reform, and attempts to articulate a moral Islamic universalism, which have in practice been determined by these existing transnational networks.

The process whereby existing rituals are taken up and re-envisaged is a well known phenomenon in ritual studies. The offering of a piece of white of cloth to the officiating monks during the Theravāda Buddhist funeral ceremony provides a particularly good example. This custom originates in pre-Buddhist funerary rituals, which included the symbolic covering of the dead body with a new, uncut piece of white cloth intended as a new garment for the deceased, but which was afterwards donated to the officiating priests. The present article examines how in the Buddhist funeral the donation of the cloth came to be associated with the monks’ ascetic practice of making their robes from discarded rags (paṃsukūla). A comparison of the lists of “rags” in the Theravāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas and in the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, alongside a historical exploration of the attitude of the Buddhist laity towards monks who adopted ascetic practices, sheds new light on the significance of the paṃsukūla offering. Further, the manner in which an old pre-existing ritual is accommodated within a different conceptual framework provides a clear instance of the primacy of ritual continuity over ritual meaning.

This article discusses the transformation that took place within the Chishtiya silsilah after its revival in the Punjab in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within this Chishtiya revival an exclusionary streak emerged, embedded within a shari‘a-centred orientation, leading to Shi‘a and Chishti Sunni antagonism in the Punjab. As a result, the composite and all-inclusive ethos epitomised by earlier Chishti Sufis of the thirteenth century was jettisoned. Underpinning these developments was the advent of the Usuli faction among the Shi‘a of Awadh, whose influence was resonating in the Punjab by the turn of the twentieth century. The khanaqah of Sial Sharif in Sargodha district illustrates this exclusionary trend, as reflected in the texts such as the Mazhab-i Shi‘a by Khawja Qammar ud Din Sialvi.

The First Sino-Japanese War during 1894 and 1895 was a dramatic moment in world events. Not only did it catch the attention of the West but, for as long as it lasted, it became a central focus of readers of newspapers in China in both English and Chinese. The Chinese public was extremely eager to read any news that could be gathered about the war, and newspaper proprietors grasped this opportunity to promote their businesses, competing to provide the latest information using wartime reporting practices already established in Britain and the United States. This paper explores the competition between two commercial Chinese language newspapers, Shenbao and Xinwenbao, in order to elucidate the relationships between patriotism, profit and readership during the First Sino-Japanese War. By comparing and contrasting how news of the war was reported in both publications, and how it was received by the public, we learn something of how these newspapers operated in gathering and publishing reports of tremendous national events, and gain insight into how commercial interests and readers' reactions to news events influenced editorial policy.

This paper seeks to illuminate the intellectual impact of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 among Pakistani Shiʻas by focusing on Sayyid ʻArif Husain al-Husaini, the dominating Shiʻi leader of the 1980s. In particular, I am interested in exploring how al-Husaini adapted hallmark themes of the Iranian revolutionary message, such as Muslim unity or political leadership of the religious scholars (ʻulama), to the specific circumstances of Pakistan. Crucial for such processes of translation was not only pressure from the Pakistani state but rather internal challenges and divisions among the Shiʻi community. While al-Husaini could draw on a strong, indigenous tradition of political mobilisation, his revolutionary ʻthird waveʼ of Shiʻi thought sat uncomfortably between Lucknow-educated traditionalists and Najaf-trained reformers who shied away from getting entangled in these novel forms of politics. By drawing on biographical accounts and al-Husaini's speeches in Urdu, I trace how his revolutionary rhetoric had to accommodate thorny local issues such as sectarianism, South Asian mourning traditions or the lack of an established Shiʻi clerical hierarchy in Pakistan.

David Gordon White's wide-ranging scholarship on tantra, yoga and alchemy has inspired many students and scholars to undertake research in those fields. White worked as an assistant to Mircea Eliade and his doctorate from the University of Chicago was in History of Religions. His research methodology, true to this scholastic heritage, is not as deeply rooted in textual criticism as that of the current vanguard of scholars working on tantra and yoga, whose philological studies rarely reference his work. The accessibility of his books and articles, however, together with his engaging writing style and the excitement that imbues his scholarship, mean that indologists specialising in other fields, and authors addressing non-scholarly audiences, frequently draw on his publications. White's prominence in the study of yoga and tantra requires all scholars working on those subjects to address his work.