‘Master Ahmad Musa, who was his father's pupil, lifted the veil from the face of depiction, and the [style of] depiction that is now current was invented by him.’1 This oft-quoted phrase from Dust Muhammad's (fl. 1510–64) preface to the Bahram Mirza Album2 serves as the inspiration behind our title for this Festschrift in honour of Dr Barbara Brend, whose work has enhanced our understanding and appreciation of Persianate painting.

The special collection appearing in this issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society makes a valuable contribution to lively ongoing discussions centred on explorations of the concept of the sovereignty of God within contemporary Islamic traditions. As its Guest Editors Humeira Iqtidar and Oliver Scharbrodt highlight in their introductory essay, the concept of divine sovereignty has come to occupy a key place in Islamist thinking, with the writings of Abul A‘la Maududi playing a hugely significant role in its twentieth- and twenty-first century articulations. Comprising articles based on papers first presented in September 2019 at an ERC-funded workshop organised jointly by King's College London and the University of Birmingham, it offers cutting-edge scholarly reflections on how Maududi's articulation of ḥākimiyyat-i ilāhiyya has been received in a multiplicity of Muslim contexts and communities. Hence, their authors—Humeira Iqtidar, Oliver Scharbrodt, Usaama Al-Azmi, and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs—grapple with how far Maududi's thinking can be understood as a response to perceived challenges of ‘modernity’, as well as to the ways in which ideas linked to this notion connect with debates going back much further in time.

This article proposes a re-examination of the phases of construction and decoration at the shrine of ‘Abd al-Samad in Natanz and demonstrates that the core fabric and elements of architectural revetments of the shrine are datable to the Seljuq period (431-590/1040-1194), or slightly later. The structure was repurposed and redecorated, including the addition of extensive lustre tiles and stucco, for ‘Abd al-Samad by Zayn al-Din al-Mastari in the early years of the fourteenth century in a series of separate phases. Particular attention is focused on the nature of the original decoration of the shrine, revealed beneath the mortar which held the, now largely removed, Ilkhanid tilework in place. Scrutiny of the decorative interventions illustrates that the application of lustre revetments in the shrine also determined a major change of the function of the monument, from a simple burial structure into a pilgrimage centre in its own right.

This article is an attempt to add a mathnawī of the sixteenth century Mughal India composed by a Mughal poet and noble, Mīrzā Khanjar Beg, for his contemporary ruler, Akbar, to the vast treasure of what is known as the advice literature or Mirror for Princes. The article deals with the content, structure, and style of the mathanwī, and contextualises it in contemporary partisan politics along with an emphasis on its features as an advice book for rulers.

I do not begin at the beginning, since whatever one wishes to speak of so often follows some significant precursor, but to make a start: F. R. Martin's The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey, from the 8th to the 18th Century was published in 1912. Martin describes his book as ‘purely prefactory to a knowledge of a hitherto neglected section of art’. It is an éminence grise, a great slab of a book presumably intended mainly for collectors and so perhaps rather intimidating to students of later ages, but containing a great deal of information, a little of which we would now see as incorrect, and a large collection of illustrations in black-and-white that continue to be useful. There is considerable focus on the work of individual artists and, in particular, attributions to Bihzad abound. Already from the title it is clear that Martin sees the painting of Iran, of (Muslim) India, and of (Ottoman) Turkey as a continuum. The question of whether these areas can—or should—be considered together or severally continues to arise, and must, I think, be decided for each particular occasion. Two other monumental books that, between them, demonstrate this question of choice are Arménag Sakisian's La miniature persane du XIIe au XVIIe siècle and E. Blochet's Musulman Painting XIIth–XVIIth Century, both of 1929.

In 1829 Pushkin visited his brother and friends in the Caucasus Corps, going on to participate in the capture of Erzurum. This marked a decisive shift in the international balance of power. Victory over Persia in 1827 and Turkey in 1829 transformed Russia into the dominant force in the Middle East for a generation until the Crimean War. Spectacular success was an almost accidental by-product of the 1825 Decembrist Revolt. Many serving Decembrists had been reduced to the ranks and exiled south. A transient, fractious combination of prudent commander and free spirits rose to rare quality of achievement. Pushkin's A Journey to Arzrum (Erzurum) celebrates his friends’ part in delivering for Russia and salutes the Russia they stood for. The literary challenge was steep. Its text had to pass muster with an infuriated Tsar Nicholas, his “personal censor”. Pushkin's skilfully drafted and structured narrative met the test, contriving at the same time to accommodate a pervasive running commentary and political messages about reconciliation, combining the best of Russia's talents and a better future. Typically innovative and beautifully written, the travelogue conducts the reader on a lively tour of the Caucasus with a rich store of incident and issues along the way.

The libraries of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt (r. 969–1171) are known to have been extraordinarily large, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes on all branches of knowledge. Of these fabled manuscripts, only a handful are known to survive. It has long been assumed that a substantial number of the secular manuscripts would have been illustrated, as many later Islamic manuscripts are illustrated, but no examples are known to have survived, although somewhat more than 150 paper fragments bearing images have been attributed to the period, as well as representations in other media, ranging from carved ivories to ceramics. In the absence of surviving illustrated manuscripts, scholars have deployed several strategies to attempt to reconstruct the lost art of painting in the Fatimid period, most notably Richard Ettinghausen in his seminal 1942 article “Painting in the Fatimid Period” and Ernst Grube in a subsequent series of articles and chapters. This article examines the evidence and explores how scholars have interpreted it within the broader contexts of representation and manuscript illustration in Islamic art.

Abul A‘la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and modern racism. How then could he reject the idea of social equality between men and women? This is particularly puzzling given his noticeable employment of a Marxist critique of the marketisation of society and liberal conceptions of freedom in his controversial 1939 book Pardah. Parsing out the structure of his argument in Pardah in some detail and emphasising the hitherto understudied engagement with Marxist ideas in his thought, this article shows that Maududi rejected a specific vision of social equality, where equality amounts to exchangeability. His use of Marxist ideas to non-Marxist ends was in large part a result of his assessment of Marx as a capable historian but a flawed philosopher, and more fundamentally a very different conception of society to the Marxist one. Maududi relied on his by then well-developed concept of divine sovereignty to carry much of the conceptual burden regarding his critique of, as well as alternatives to, social equality.

This essay argues that the rise and circulation of large numbers of Sanskrit literary anthologies as well as story traditions about poets in the second millennium together index important changes in the ‘author-function’ within the Sanskrit literary tradition. While modern ‘empirical authorship’ and external referentiality in Sanskrit has long been deemed ‘elusive'by Western scholarship, the new forms of literary production in the second millennium suggest a distinct new interest in authorship among wider literary communities. This new ‘author-function’ indexed a shift in the perceptions of literary production and the literary tradition itself. Focusing on the famous sixteenth-century work known as the Bhojaprabandha as both an anthology as well as a storybook about poets, this essay further argues that the paradigmatic courts of kings like Vikramāditya and Bhoja (but particularly the latter), placed not in historical time but in an archaic temporality, became the mise en scène for the figure of the poet in the second-millennium literary imagination. They were courts where the finest poets of the tradition appeared and where their virtuosity could be savored and reflected upon by generations of readers.

This article presents and discusses a source of unique importance for our knowledge of early modern global exchanges. Produced in 1503 by the Egyptian administration and found among the records of a Venetian company with global commercial interests, the document records hitherto unknown connections between the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia, followed by cargo figures. By sending the Memorandum to the head office in Venice, the Company's agents in Egypt were labouring to solve the most important concern of Venice's information network, that of coordinating Indian with Mediterranean trading seasons. By analysing the document's context, namely, a company involved in the export of central European metals to Asia, this article focuses on the capacity of its agents to gather information through collaboration, networking and ultimately, friendship with Muslim partners and informers. The story of the 1503 Memorandum and its transmission raises questions about the mixed networks underpinning global exchanges, the role of information and the drive of the late Mamluk sultanate into the world of the Indian Ocean.

Divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyya)—as conceived by Abū al-A‘lā Mawdūdī (1903–79) and popularised by Sayyid Quṭb (1906–66) - has been a central component of Islamist thought. This article investigates the reception of the concept within Shi‘i Islam. As case studies, the article choses two prominent actors in the formative period of Shi‘i Islamism in Iraq: Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (1935–80) and Muḥammad Taqī al-Mudarrisī (b. 1945). By discussing their reflections on the nature of an Islamic state, the article pursues three objectives: first, it overcomes a trend in academic scholarship that disregards Sunni influences on the development of Shi‘i Islamism. Second, the article highlights the role that the Iraqi Shi‘i intellectual milieu played in incorporating key Islamist concepts into Shi‘i political thought. Finally, the article demonstrates the different receptions of ḥākimiyya. Bāqir al-Ṣadr uses the ideological repertoire of Islamism to explore in pragmatic terms the parameters that define the state as Islamically legitimate. In contrast, Taqī al-Mudarrisī uses ḥākimiyya to redefine the sovereignty of the state in Islamic terms. He operationalises the concept in a Shi‘i context by arguing that the state must be led by a just jurisconsult (al-faqīh al-‘ādil) who becomes the sole agent of divine sovereignty in the state.

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.

Ilkhanid rule (1256–1353) heralded a period when the arts of the book flourished, with the production of both religious and secular texts. This article examines the binding of the Hamadan Qur'an (Dar al-Kutub, Cairo, Rasid 72), which was commissioned for the Ilkhanid Sultan Öljaytü (1303–1316) and completed in 1313. The Qur'an, composed of 30 parts, has remained intact in the Dar al-Kutub in Cairo since its arrival in Egypt sometime in the 1320s. The decoration of the binding is representative of the geometrical designs that formed part of the Persian binders’ repertoire before being entirely discarded by the middle of the fourteenth century in favour of lobed and ogival medallions with pendants derived from cloud-collar profiles.1

This paper discusses discourse features such as tail-head linkage and repetition, development devices, associative strategies and subordination in oral narrative texts in the Koroshi (KoB), Sistani (SiB), and Coastal (CoB) dialects of Balochi, all of which belong to the North-West branch of the Iranian language family. The frequency with which these features vary with the dialect, and the variation can be attributed to different stages of orality. Three stages have been identified, with CoB and SiB at the ends of the cline and KoB located in between. CoB is the most conservative dialect, as different aspects of its grammar also show; it demonstrates a pure orality state by its frequent use of tail-head linkage, repetition and juxtaposition, and by the relative infrequency with which it employs associative and subordination strategies. SiB and its close relation Turkmenistan Balochi [TB])1 use associative and subordination strategies more frequently, have fully lexicalised development devices and seldom employs tail-head linkage, repetition and juxtaposition. This loss of oral techniques demonstrates that the state of narration in SiB has switched from oral to written style. Finally, KoB represents a language in a state of transition by using more unmarked tail-head linkage, repetition and juxtaposition and by a strong tendency to employ subordination strategies.