Neither of the terms commonly used to describe the seventh-century expansion of the movement that comes to be called Islam – “the Islamic conquests” or “the Arab conquests” – is satisfactory; both terms are anachronistic and in some ways misleading; yet there is, at present, no clear candidate for an alternative terminology. This article discusses the weaknesses of existing nomenclatures, with reference to relevant primary sources, and the conceptual problems the traditional nomenclatures pose in the context of an extensive review of scholarly literature from roughly 1900 to the present. It offers a few suggestions for possible new terminologies, but essentially opens the question for further discussion.

All Semitic languages use a relative marker as at least one strategy of relativization, and all branches show reflexes or relics of reflexes of an interdental relative marker. The wide consensus that the relative pronoun was originally identical to the proximal demonstrative is based on the formal identity between the bases of the two in West Semitic, and on the wide attestation of the process Demonstrative > Relative in world languages. In this paper, we will show that there are a number of significant problems with the reconstruction of the relative pronoun, which, when taken together, make tracing its origin to the demonstrative highly unlikely. Instead we will argue that the opposite is true: the demonstrative in West Semitic is a secondary formation on the basis of the relative marker.

As is well known, the biblical sixth commandment, “Thou shall not kill”, is intimately linked to the First Commandment, “I am the Lord”. By linking the two at the top of Moses's two-column table, language is given priority: the name of God can be uttered only when the possibility of death has been set aside. In this way, the linking of these two commandments marks not only the birth of language, but also, more importantly, the start of ethics. As such, commandments one and six form the basis of practically all Western ethics from Kant's categorical imperative (the unconditional maxim needs a First Word to enter into force) to Lyotard's language games (for which all utterances are charged with the moral imperative to respond), for example. But how on earth does this famous linguistic and ethical structure fare in a context whereby the written text is not given priority, in a situation where prohibitions are inherited orally? This paper will attempt to expose the thorny issue of the role of the sixth commandment in the context of Rwanda. This will imply neither the exposition of the history of the arrival of the Bible in Rwanda nor the way it helped to consolidate the colonial regime. This paper will also not examine the neglect of the prohibition against murder during the genocide of 1994. Instead, the essay will examine the linguistic and cultural problems one faces when determining the birth of ethics in two radically different contexts.

This paper examines the evidence for the marginal feminine endings *-ay- and *-āy- in Proto-Semitic, and the feminine endings *-e and *-a in Proto-Berber. Their similar formation (*CV̆CC-ay/āy), semantics (verbal abstracts, underived concrete feminine nouns) and plural morphology (replacement of the feminine suffix by a plural suffix with -w-) suggest that this feminine formation should be reconstructed to a shared ancestor which may be called Proto-Berbero-Semitic.

The importance of documentary sources for the history of the official postal system (barīd) in the first century of Islam has long been acknowledged. In addition to a small number of documents from the eastern part of the Muslim Empire, Egyptian papyri from the 90s/710s and 130s/750s form the main documentary sources for modern studies on the postal system. These papyri belong to a distinct phase in Islamic history. Papyri from other, especially earlier, phases have largely been neglected. The present article addresses the history of Egypt's official postal system from the Muslim conquest up to c. 132/750. It argues that the postal system gradually developed out of Byzantine practices and was shaped by innovations by Muslim rulers through which their involvement in the postal system's administration gradually increased. The article ends with an edition of P.Khalili II 5, a papyrus document from 135/753 on the provisioning of postal stations.

Using theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari and Heidegger, this essay is a critique of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's much publicized decision to write in Gikuyu rather than English, the language Ngugi condemns as the instrument of colonialism and its successor, neo-imperialism. In line with Deleuze and Guattari's argument that Kafka's work is best apprehended as the determination to make German bear the full weight of his “minor” (as a Czech Jew) experience, this essay elucidates the ways in which Ngugi's ostensibly political turn is unable to write what it means to live, in Deleuze and Guattari's phrase, “in another's language”. To live, that is, the experience of “dislocation” (a rubric which would include colonialism and the failures of African sovereignty, not least among them) from one's own language (however provisional and contingent such a claim on language always is) as the first – necessary – condition of making literature. Of making language bear the weight of the very experience it is intent on denying articulation.

Several verbal forms reconstructed for proto-Semitic strongly resemble reconstructed forms in proto-Berber: compare Semitic yV-PaRRaS to Berber y-əFăRRăS, Semitic yV-PRaS to Berber y-əFRăS, and Semitic yV-PRuS and yV-PRiS to Berber y-ăFRəS. We suggest that these forms are historically related and sketch a line of development from the reconstructed meanings to their attested uses. yVPaRRaS, originally imperfective, retains that value in both Berber and Semitic. yVPRas, originally stative, gained a perfective meaning in Berber and Semitic; the stative meaning is retained in Berber, but was largely lost in Semitic. yVPRus/yVPRiS, originally perfective, retained that meaning in Semitic, merging with the newly perfective yVPRas forms; in Berber, yVPRaS completely replaced perfective yVPRuS/yVPRiS, relegating the latter to non-aspectual uses. We conclude by considering the quality of the first vowel; the alternation seen in Berber y-əFRăS and y-ăFRəS supports reconstructions as yiPRaS and yaPRuS/yaPRiS, conforming to the Barth–Ginsberg Law of Semitic.

The Iranian Empire emerged in the third century in the interstices of the Silk Road that increasingly linked the markets of the Mediterranean and the Near East with South, Central, and East Asia. The ensuing four centuries of Iranian rule corresponded with the heyday of trans-Eurasian trade, as the demand of moneyed imperial elites across the continent for one another's high-value commodities stimulated the development of long-distance networks. Despite its position at the nexus of trans-continental and trans-oceanic commerce, accounts of Iran in late antiquity relegate trade to a marginal role in its political economy. The present article seeks to foreground the contribution of trans-continental mercantile networks to the formation of Iran and to argue that its development depended as much on the political economies of its western and eastern neighbours as on internal Near Eastern factors.

In recent years a number of scholars have proposed more or less detailed schemas of the formation of the Zoroastrian ritual. These schemas offer accounts of the arrangement of the texts in the liturgy, the process of its formation, and even its function from an endogenous perspective. One way or another, they argue that the official Zoroastrian liturgy is an integrated ritual with a coherent text, and that the function of the ritual and the intention behind the arrangement of the texts can be determined by means of philological, literary and comparative analyses. The questions of formation and meaning of the Zoroastrian liturgy these scholars have placed on the agenda are important not only for the study of Zoroastrianism but also for the history of religions and ritual theory. I consider their accounts with respect to the texts they invoke and the methods they use, and show that their arguments suffer from fatal flaws.

Tanzanian novelist and philosopher Euphrase Kezilahabi strives to “dismantle the resemblance of language to the world” (1985: 216) through challenging the fundamental philosophical dichotomy of subject and object. The result of this dismantling will be a new “language whose foundation is Being” (Kezilahabi 1991: 69; lugha ambayo msingi wake ni kuwako). This is an expression of a new relationship between humanity and Being built on a holistic epistemology of experience and embodiment. Through “kuwako”, Kezilahabi expresses in Swahili the Heideggerian concept of Sein (Being). His adherence to Heidegger, however, puts him at risk of compromising the very foundation of his own philosophy: his continued critique of essentialism. This article argues that Kezilahabi salvages his concept of “kuwako” from these essentialist pitfalls precisely through his declared “destructive rather than deconstructive stand vis-à-vis the Western philosophy of value and representation” (Kezilahabi 1985: 4). The destruction is implemented on the thematic level: a phase of “vurumai” (chaos) which destroys previous traditions of philosophy is staged in Nagona. However, translation is an even more powerful device to carry out this destruction: “kuwako” is not an innocent reiteration but a radical reformulation of Heidegger's central philosophical concept, decisively informed by Kezilahabi's lifelong propensity for existentialism.

The province of Khurāsān constituted the centre of political, cultural, and religious life in the Sunni Islamic world from the ninth until the mid-twelfth century, after which Khurāsān was completely eclipsed. The question of how this occurred has remained almost completely unstudied; and the one study that there is does not consult the key primary literary sources for the time. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to re-examine what the primary sources reveal about the catastrophic cultural and political eclipse of Khurāsān in the mid-twelfth century, in order to demonstrate that this catastrophe was not due to “climate, cotton and camels” – in fact, Khurāsān was doing very well until the 1150s – but to concrete human agency and action: namely, the province's destruction by the rampaging Oghuz Turkmens after Sultan Sanjar had been taken captive by them in 1153, thus leading directly to the downfall of the Great Seljuq Sultanate.

The literary form and rhetorical structure of ancient Chinese poems have not been sufficiently studied. The “Jiu zhang” 九章 (Nine Avowals) attributed to Qu Yuan 屈原 contain distinctive formal features which are highly suggestive for interpretations of Qu Yuan's life and works. At the level of rhetoric, the protagonist frequently describes his own mental state using metaphors of knots and entanglement. At the level of form, the internal structure of the poems, and “Chou si” 抽思 (Unravelled Yearnings) in particular, involves series of overlapping, cross-referencing units that recall the “strange loop” discussed by Douglas Hofstadter as a model of human consciousness. Reading these poems is not just a matter of reconstructing their historical contexts but also of understanding their intended effects on the reader, who is effectively transported into a simulation of Qu Yuan's mind.

This article explores the ways in which African American Mercer Cook's translation practice reflects complex overlaps between his professional/personal selves and an ideological backdrop that encompasses black internationalism, US race struggles and mid-twentieth-century diplomatic relations with Africa. A first section explores how Cook, a university professor of French, uses what he terms the “close-to-home” value of translation in order to expose his African American students to what has been written about them in French. At the same time, translation is seen by him as essential to building a “shared elsewhere” where his students can reflect on their place within a black world that is neither nation-bound nor monolingual. A second section examines the way in which Cook's translation practice is inflected by his role as US ambassador in francophone West Africa during the 1960s. In this context, the convergence of US civil rights with official US Cold War policy on postcolonial African states is key to understanding Cook's stance as a translator and the way in which he seeks diplomatically to propel his translations of L.S Senghor's texts towards a racially riven US readership.

Until the Mughal period historians of Muslim India hardly mention ladies, as it was considered discourteous, and even then only a handful of noble women were deemed worthy of mention. A secluded lady was of concern only to the man of the house. There was Sultan Raḍiya, Īltutmish's daughter, who succeeded to the throne and enjoyed a degree of freedom during Turkish rule in India, but was killed, accused of an illicit relationship with a black slave. Nevertheless, many women's influence reached beyond the harem and their voices appear between the lines. One such woman was the Sharqī Sultan Muḥammad's mother, Bībī Rājī, who played a significant role in the affairs of Jaunpur, but this article concerns another: Sultan Sikandar Lodī’s mother, known as Bībī Zarrīna (the Lady of Gold) who defied the Lodī nobility to put her son on the throne. Here we explore her story and study her tomb.

Headhunting has a long and well-documented history in China, but most people are today unaware of this practice, first recorded in Shang oracle bones and regularly mentioned in ancient Chinese texts until the Han dynasty. This ignorance is because headhunting subsequently came to be seen as a barbaric practice and knowledge concerning its long history was destroyed: this was achieved by inventing a new character, guo 聝, which means “to cut the ear of a dead enemy combatant” and using this to replace (and thus confuse meanings with) an older character guo 馘, which refers specifically to headhunting. Ancient texts in which headhunting practices are documented have been misunderstood and misrepresented by imperial era scholars to prevent anyone from seeing that ancient China was a headhunting culture. This study shows how dominant cultural norms can impact on the way in which texts are read.

This article focuses on Georges Balandier's autobiographical essay Afrique ambiguë (1957). Its translation into English, Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision (1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text, Ambiguous Africa does not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier's book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on the part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor to Présence Africaine – he records the environmental, artistic, psychological, and linguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier's assessment is pessimistic, but he identifies the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text.

This article consists mainly of an annotated transcription of a report on the wartime courses in Japanese at SOAS prepared by Frank Daniels in August 1945. An introduction is provided setting his report in context and providing some of the background relating to the attempts by SOAS, well before the outbreak of war with Japan, to persuade the government that training needed to begin without delay. These attempts were unsuccessful, but Frank Daniels and the teachers assembled to help him, including his Japanese wife and some Japanese released from internment in the UK, successfully developed a teaching programme that went on to train many individuals who were to become the first generation of university Japanologists in the UK.

This article analyses Shakespeare and Molière's enduring appeal in various African countries and the diversity of their plays’ adaptations. The starting point is the discrepancy between the two playwrights, Shakespeare in Africa being an artistic phenomenon (a controversial one in some quarters), while the adaptation of Molière remains mainly the domain of school curricula. This article will first provide a historical overview of activities related to the introduction of Shakespeare and Molière's works in Africa. Second, it will set out to analyse the varied adaptation and “Africanization” of both playwrights’ work. It will shed light on the political and scholarly disputes over the incorporation of these authors in school curricula after independence and examine the ways in which these classical European texts were domesticated in Africa.