The Mongols as part of popular imagination have acquired the reputation of providing nothing more than a fierce but amusing footnote in history, men on horseback who appeared from nowhere in the thirteenth-century and receded into obscurity a century or so later. As the articles in this volume demonstrate, the popular imagination is un-nuanced and, far from being transitory rogues, the Mongols, and their complex narratives, made a significant impact upon many histories and cultures across the world as they expanded through Asia changing, modifying and absorbing much in their wake.

This essay challenges the received idea that Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, the eighth-century Arabic translator of the Kalīla-Dimna fables, added the Trial of Dimna, the sequel to the first story of the Lion and the Bull, in order to let morality win in the end. The analysis of this sequel's synopsis shows the absence of morality and how the ruler uses the judicial to manipulate public opinion and to redress his politically-damaged image. The essay also shows that the sequel's main purpose and use is to give a practical demonstration of the art of forensic rhetoric, casting Dimna as a pre-eminent and redoubtable sophist. The Anvār-i Suhaylī version, the fifteenth-century Persian rewriting by Vā’iz Kāshifī, on which the essay is based, also engages with the philosophical conundrum of tasdīq, which seems absent in the Arabic versions of the text.

Turkic Runic inscriptions, discovered in Mongolia during the second half of the 20th century and especially in the last decade, are remarkable. The Bombogor, consisting of five-lines, is one of them. This article is an attempt to re-read the mentioned inscription which was first published by Ts. Battulga. According to my proposed reading, the text was written on a tombstone which was erected in honour of a Turkish qunčuy (“princess”) who might have been married into the Karluk tribe.

The working title for this festschrift was ‘Papers for the Padishah’. It was discarded for the sake of propriety as well as the well-known decree that all academic books must include a colon, a decree which some would say is worthy of Chinggis Khan himself. Nonetheless, I believe it is fair to consider David O. Morgan the Padishah of the study of the Mongol Empire. David, ever humble, would simply wave this title away and offer another scholar the throne. In this sense, David is like Ogodei Khan—generous, well-liked by all, and he laid much of the modern foundations for the study of the Mongols. Yet, David, like Ghazan Khan, always kept one foot firmly in Iranian Studies as well, thus giving him claim to the title of Padishah. David's similarity to the Mongols does not end there, however, as he carved his own intellectual empire.

Published in 1879 in the Tahzīb ul-Akhlāq as well as in book form, Maulana Altaf Husain Hali's Musaddas on the Ebb and Flow of Islam (better known as Musaddas-e Hālī) is a unique text. The poem, which recalls a glorious Islamic past and mourns its decline in India, both drew on the Urdu shahr āshob tradition that had developed since the eighteenth century as well as innovatively developed a very Arabic “flavour” and style that was uncommon at the time. While C. Shackle and J. Majeed have analysed Hali's use of typical Arabic literary devices in their excellent study and edition of the Musaddas, they conceded that “the overt influence of Arabic poetry is less easy to establish”. However, new evidence from the Aligarh Institute Gazette of 1878 brings another piece to the puzzle and enables us to situate Hali's Musaddas in its broader historical and literary context: indeed, two articles written by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in January of that year show that Hali's masterpiece was in fact conceived as an Urdu re-adaptation of an Arabic classic, al-Rundi's famous Lament for the fall of Seville.

In the introduction to his article, entitled “The Murder of Ibn abī l-Ḥuqayq: On the Origin and Reliability of Some Maghāzī Reports”, Harald Motzki summarises “special biases” by which western scholars deal with the Muslim sources concerning the life of the Prophet. For Motzki, one of the most important biases held against the Muslim sources is that “The background is theological, in that the traditions tried to create a specific theology of history, or in that the Muslims simply tended to put a halo around the founder of their religion”.2

This article considers the Islamic-era sources that report the history of the last Sasanian kings. It focuses on scenes that seem to indicate Christian influence and asks what this tells us about Christian transmission of the Middle Persian royal histories and about the position of Christians in the empire more broadly. In particular, it discusses three scenes from al-Ṭabarī: his presentation of Hormizd IV as a ‘pluralist’ monarch; the changing attitudes of Christians to Khusrau II and the presentation of Khusrau's short-lived successors.

This article engages with the 838–841/1435–1437 Anatolian adventures of the Mamluk amir Jānibak al-Ṣūfī. It demonstrates how Jānibak's narrative is a remarkable story full of meanings, which enable a more nuanced understanding of Mamluk engagements with southern and eastern Anatolia during the reign of sultan al-Ashraf Barsbāy (825–41/1422–38). First Jānibak's whereabouts in Anatolia are reconstructed on the one hand as they appear from contemporary source material and as they have been analysed in a handful of modern studies on the other. Against this historiographical background, a more comprehensive understanding of Jānibak's role and significance is then developed, combining local, Syro-Egyptian and Anatolian readings of Jānibak's story into one integrated social network approach. This reconstruction of Jānibak's social network in the Anatolian frontier zone finally leads to a number of conclusions on the complexity of political life in the 1430s in eastern Anatolia, on the nature of Barsbāy's state, and on the shared realities of 15th-century political cultures in the Nile-to-Black-Sea area.

This article investigates political vocabulary and metaphor in the writings of al-Juwayni (d. 1085) to bring out the commitments and presuppositions of premodern Islamic political tradition and raises the question of their compatibility with those of the modern nation-state.

The period following the death of Saladin (589/1193) was a formative one in the history of the Ayyūbid empire. It saw the eventual establishment of Saladin's younger brother Sayf al-Dīn al-Malik al-ʿĀdil as the acknowledged sovereign of the various territories ruled by members of the Ayyūbid family, overturning the succession arrangements that Saladin had put into place; and it established modes of behaviour to be followed, mutatis mutandis, following the death of a leading Ayyūbid ruler on future occasions. The main loser in al-ʿĀdil's rise to the sultanate was Saladin's eldest son, al-Malik al-Afḍal ʿAlī, whom some have written off as an incompetent failure. In this paper for David Morgan, for many years my trusted colleague in the SOAS History Department, I suggest that that judgment on al-Afḍal is open to appeal.

Notwithstanding a recent resurgence of scholarly interest in what one may call “Mappila Studies”—the body of scholarship on the Muslims of Malabar in the Malayalam-speaking South Indian state of Kerala—research on this community still leaves too much to be desired. As for the fate of Mappila literary culture within this incipient field of study, scholars have either given short shrift to or painted in broad brushstrokes the impressive literary legacy of the Mappila Muslims of Malabar despite its enormous historic/al and socio-cultural value.2 That said, even the tiny array of scholarly works, mostly by Malayali scholars, that seeks to treat of Mappila literature has largely approached the subject, I argue, from a provincialised “literary” vantage point, thereby reducing the whole of Mappila narratives to mere aesthetic artifacts having no bearing upon the lives of Mappilas. I call this dominant paradigm of doing Mappila literature “literarisation”—that is, fetishising the “literariness” of text by privileging its formal, stylistic, and aesthetic features over its social tone and life. This view assumes text to be a domain of symbols separable from a domain of practice and disregards the social production of text which cannot be abstracted out from the materialities giving shape to it.3

The authors and the Journal apologise for the following errors in this article:

The coloured cartouches mentioned under the map on the 24th page have been deleted.

The reference to Figure 1 on the 23rd page pertains to the Map on the 24th page.

This article sets out to delineate the process that led to the establishment of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore in 1875. It lays down the context within which the plan to set up art institutions in India was conceived. Contrary to Krishnan Kumar's view whereby the coloniser and the colonised constituted an adult-child relationship the coloniser, in that particular relationship took the role of the adult whereas the native became the child which had been a salient feature of the educational and academic landscape of British India. By challenging Krishna Kumar, this article while drawing on the inferences of Partha Mitter and Hussain Ahmad Khan, argues that in the realm of art instruction the analysis of colonial strategies of adjustment and readjustment provide useful insights about the administrative constraints and cognitive failures of the colonial administrators in the nineteenth-Century Punjab. Challenges like space-selection for MSA campus, appropriate Curriculum for the students and their inadequate language skills stared its founder Principal Lockwood Kipling (1837–19011) in the face. This forms the major focus of the article.

The geopolitical shape of the Middle East has varied greatly over time. This article is concerned with the period from Late Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century, during which four basic configurations succeeded each other. Late Antiquity was marked by the coexistence of two large empires, one based in the western Middle East and the other in the eastern Middle East; the early Islamic period saw the dominance of a single empire the location of whose centre was unstable; the medieval period was characterised by the absence of large and lasting empires and a shifting plurality of smaller states; finally in the Ottoman period we see the renewed dominance of a single empire, now based in the western Middle East. Are these changes to be seen as random fluctuations, or can they be explained in terms of a small number of underlying factors? The point of this article is to argue that a focus on the potential imperial heartlands of the Middle East can help us to explain much—though not all—of the changing geopolitical configuration of the region.

Comparing the Liao, the Chinggisid and the Qing successive incorporations of Inner Asia, this article is prepared to argue that the hereditary divisional system that these Inner Asian empires employed to incorporate and administer their nomadic population was the engine that generated what scholars see either as ‘tribes’ or ‘aristocratic order’. This divisional system, because of its hereditary membership and rulership, invariably tended to produce autonomous lordships with distinct names and identities unless the central government took measures to curb the tendency. Whenever the central power waned, these divisions emerged as independent powers in themselves and their lords as contenders for the central power. The Chinggisid power structure did not destroy any tribal order; instead, it destroyed and incorporated a variety of former Liao politico-administrative divisions into its own decimally organized minqans and transformed the former Liao divisions into quasi-political named categories of populace, the irgens, stripping them of their own politico-administrative structures. In turn, the Qing, in incorporating Mongolia, divided the remains of the Chinggisid divisions, the tümens and otogs, into khoshuu and transformed them into quasi-political ayimaqs. Thus, it was the logic of the imperial incorporation and the hereditary divisional system that produced multiple politico-administrative divisions and quasi-political identity categories.

A new copperplate inscription of Vainyagupta, to be presented in this article, is important as one of the rare sources that provide a glimpse of the later history of the Ājīvikas. It also tells us about their worship of Maṇibhadra, one of the eminent yakṣas, with interesting information on his iconography. Finally, it gives us some insights into the early history of Samataṭa, a subregion of Bengal on its eastern fringe, as it includes a copy of the grant of an earlier king named Nāthacandra. In this article, I will present an edition of the inscription and discuss some historical aspects revealed by it in connection with other sources.

The following joint article is a departure from standard studies, in that historical research is put side-by-side with numismatic evidence. It reflects the growing awareness of the underlying concepts of steppe society that significantly shaped the formation and endurance of the Mongol Empire. With new analysis, it is apparent that the society was clear about these concepts and expressed them in very public pronouncements. They are most evident in the early period of the empire; during the formation of the state by Chinggis Khan and his first two successors, Ögödei (r. 1229–41) and Güyük (r.1246-48). However, the cataclysmic civil war in the middle of the thirteenth century between the Ögödeyids and Toluids removed direct acknowledgment of such a social ethos. Indeed, after 1250 khans strongly focused on pragmatic issues and relied less on philosophical theories of legitimacy, at least Mongolian ones. By contrast, the first three rulers were keenly aware of the theory of the state and the way society functioned within it. They developed this ethos into a fairly cohesive form that provided moral strength to a nascent regime. The evidence for this development emerges from the study of two particular words, tengri, “Heaven”, and especially töre, “grand principle”. Töre in this usage was the equivalent of the ‘binding and unbinding’ and the sunna of the messenger, Muḥammad, in medieval Islamic societies and of democracy in modern times. Tengri and töre are culturally defined theories closely related to the Aristotelian sense of positive law. In all cases, reality required various approaches to them at a given period of time. As a result, the concept of töre had existed before the empire and continues to this day, always implying the correct order of good governance.

In the colonial anthropology of India developed in connection with the decennial censuses in the late nineteenth century, caste and religion were major topics of enquiry, although caste was particularly important. Official anthropologists, mostly members of the Indian Civil Service, reified castes and religious communities as separate ‘things’ to be counted and classified. In the 1911 and later censuses, less attention was paid to caste, but three officials – E. A. Gait, E. A. H. Blunt and L. S. S. O'Malley – made significant progress in understanding the caste system by recognising and partly overcoming the problems of reification. In this period, however, there was less progress in understanding popular religion. The Morley-Minto reforms established separate Muslim electorates in 1909; communal representation was extended in 1921 by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and again by the 1935 Government of India Act, which also introduced reservations for the Untouchable Scheduled Castes. Gait and Blunt were involved in the Montagu-Chelmsford debates, and Blunt in those preceding the 1935 Act. In the twentieth century, the imperial government's most serious problems were the nationalist movement, mainly supported by the middle class, and religious communalism. But there were no ethnographic data on the middle class, while the data on popular religion showed that Hindus and Muslims generally did not belong to separate communities; anthropological enquiry also failed to identify the Untouchable castes satisfactorily. Thus, official anthropology became increasingly irrelevant to policy making and could no longer strengthen the colonial state.

Mountbatten once said, “I sincerely hope that His Majesty's Government will support me should this eventuality arise. But I feel that if we can blot out 10,000 fanatics in the first round we may stop four hundred million people from being involved in war”.1 Despite his strong commitment and prompt responses to the communal riots, Mountbatten's inability to prevent the massacres, especially brutal and widespread in the Punjab, and in the rest of the country in general, invited criticism of his role as the last leader of British India. It is important, therefore, to analyze the dynamics of the communal violence in the Punjab and Mountbatten's response to it. This paper attempts to understand Mountbatten's reading of Punjab's communal problem and his efforts to deal with it. It also analyzes the measures he took to curb and eradicate violence which resulted from that. Hence, this study fills an important gap in our existing historical literature and helps in revising prevailing views about Mountbatten's real role in dealing with the communal riots in the Punjab.

The first decade of the 21st century proved remarkably fertile in yielding up manuscripts relevant to the earliest direct contacts between Latin Europe and the Mongol empire – namely, those framed by the devastation of Rus´ (1237-40), Poland, Moravia and Hungary (1241-2) by the Mongols (or ‘Tartars’) and the subsequent despatch to the Mongol world of three parties of friars (1245-7) as envoys of Pope Innocent IV. These texts include:- (1) an early manuscript of the Epistula de vita secta et origine Tartarorum of the Hungarian Dominican Julian, who travelled to the Ural region in 1236–7 in search of the Hungarians’ pagan kinsmen in what was known as ‘Greater Hungary’, and returned with news of the imminent Mongol assault on Rus´; (2) two hitherto unknown letters from the Nestorian monk Simeon Rabban-ata to the Emperor Frederick II and King Louis IX of France, brought back from Azerbaijan in 1247 by one of Innocent IV's envoys, the Dominican André de Longjumeau; and (3) a second copy of the so-called ‘Tartar Relation’, an account produced in Poland in mid July 1247 by a Franciscan friar calling himself ‘C. de Bridia’ and closely linked with the most celebrated of the papal embassies to the Mongols, which was led by the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini and travelled across the Eurasian steppes as far as the court of the Qaghan Güyük in Mongolia.