The article reconstructs a debate between Hanafi jurists who operated throughout Ottoman Greater Syria (and beyond) from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries concerning the evidentiary status of the Ottoman imperial registers (defters). At the centre of the jurists’ debate is the permissibility of using imperial registers as independent, uncorroborated evidence. It was a debate about who had the right to regulate and determine what constituted an authentic evidential document: while some jurists argued that it was almost exclusively the privilege of the jurists, others were willing to concede this authority, at least in part, to the Ottoman dynasty and its bureaucracy. Furthermore, the article contends that the debate about the evidentiary validity of the defters captures the complex relationship between Ottoman dynastic law and the Hanafi fiqh discourse. Finally, the debate sheds light on the legal “defterization” of other types of documents and texts, such as a chronicle (taʾrīkh) and court records (sijill).

Armenian karmir “red” has often been considered as deriving from East Iranian, thus speaking in favour of relations between Armenian and Sogdian, a Middle Iranian language spoken at considerable distance from Armenia. For the origin of Hebrew karmīl, on the other hand, a Middle Persian “karmīr” has been suggested. In either case, the etymology would be Proto-Indo-European *ku̯ṛ́mi- “worm” (be it directly or as a borrowing from Sanskrit kṛ́mi-) from which the colour term would be derived in a way parallel to French vermeil “scarlet” from ver “worm”, thus a term referring to a red dye obtained from scale insects (cochineals). I argue that karmīr is not a Middle Persian word for “red”, that Sogdian is unlikely to be the source of the Armenian and Hebrew words, and that an Indian origin is not probable either because of the specific features of the Indian scale insect dye. Conversely, Armenian scarlet was widely known and appreciated already in antiquity, so that, for historical as well as linguistic reasons, the origin of the word is likely to be an Iranian language within the region where Armenian was spoken.

This article is the first systematic investigation on the location, layout, design and functions of Fāṭimid gardens. Our study is based on primary sources and focuses on different elements of the recreational and ceremonial functions of gardens. Very little is known about the layout of the royal Fāṭimid gardens because no garden has survived or been excavated so far as we are aware. However, we collected physical insights on the layout and shape of these Fāṭimid gardens through different archaeological excavations in Cairo and outside of Egypt, including our recent discoveries and the garden that we found in Darrāsa.

In this paper, I argue that the Semitic kinship terms *ʔab-‘father’, *ʔaḫ- ‘brother’, and *ḥam- ‘father-in-law’ originally ended in a w, which left traces in several of their forms. In the singular, the w contracted with the case vowels leaving a distinctive pattern of short and long vowels in the unbound, bound, and suffixal forms. In the plural, the w was retained in several languages due to the insertion of an a-vowel between the final two root consonants, a common Afro-Asiatic pluralization strategy: *ʔabw- > *ʔabaw. I further suggest that the West Semitic plural morpheme -aw was derived by analogy with the plurals *ʔabaw and *ʔaḫaw, and is not, as commonly suggested, an inherited Semitic or Afro-Asiatic plural marker.

Biblical proof-texts for the prophethood of Muḥammad play a prominent role in early Muslim interest in the Bible. This study re-examines the earliest known attempt by Muslims to find such a biblical proof-text in the New Testament – the Arabic version of Jesus's sermon on the “advocate/comforter” (Gk. paráklētos) in John 15: 23–16 found in Ibn Isḥāq's Kitāb al-Maghāzī. Key to understanding Ibn Isḥāq's adaptation of the Johannine text, this study argues, is the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Gospel behind it as well as the climate of Late Antique apocalypticism and messianism out of which Ibn Isḥāq's distinctively Islamic version emerged. This study concludes with an interpretation of Quran 61: 6, which appears to claim that Jesus prophesied a future prophet named Aḥmad.

Unlike some other New Azari dialects1 (Kalāsurī, Harzandī,2 etc.), Šāhrūdī3 preserves grammatical gender, which is reflected in nouns and sporadically in adjectives, pronouns and the verbal system. In this regard Šāhrūdī is similar to the Tākestānī dialects, in which the opposition of feminine and masculine is also attested in nominal, adjectival, pronominal and verbal systems (Yarshater 1969a: 198–9). In the Šāhrūd dialect group there is no gender marker for masculine, except for the 3rd person singular of the present tense of the auxiliary verb.

This paper is a first attempt at understanding the impact of Islam on families in eighth-century rural Ṭukhāristan (modern-day northern Afghanistan), at the periphery of the late Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Tukhāristan lay in the ancient region of Bactria, which became the land and city of Balkh after the Islamic conquests of the early seven hundreds ad. My analysis is based on a fascinating corpus of legal documents and letters, written in Bactrian and Arabic in the fourth to eighth centuries ad, which were discovered, edited and translated relatively recently. Scholars of Central Asia have tended to discuss the region's early Islamic history within a politico-military framework based on chronicles and prosopographies written in Arabic and/or adapted into Persian centuries after the Muslim conquests. Such narrative sources describe an ideal state defined by genres of Islamic historiography, and come with the usual menu of distortions, simplifications and exoticisms. The documents under review, on the other hand, were written to serve immediate and practical uses; the evidence they offer is devoid of rhetoric, recording aspects of life and social groupings to which we would otherwise have no access. This paper argues that during the transition to Islamic rule (c. ad 700–771), Bactrian and Islamic administrative systems co-existed, and significantly affected family life and marriage traditions. Specifically, it is suggested that the early ʿAbbāsid tax system eclipsed the age-old practice of fraternal polyandry here: more by default than by design.

Ordeals (by fire, by water, etc.) are a judicial institution in which defendants try to prove their innocence by divine judgement. In a recent law and economics paper, Leeson (2012) suggests that (medieval) ordeals “work” because, and if, ordeal takers have sufficient belief in them and because the priests administering ordeals “manipulate” them in an appropriate manner. We find that Leeson's theory also helps us understand Indian ordeals. Interestingly, some dharma texts require that the accuser agrees to the ordeal too, a requirement absent in Leeson's theory. We extend Leesons's model accordingly.

The sociolinguistic phenomenon of codeswitching, both diglossic and bilingual (Arabic–Hebrew), is extremely pervasive in all varieties of Palestinian Arabic, including Negev Arabic. Surprisingly, neither of these types of codeswitching in Palestinian Arabic has received due scholarly attention; moreover, their interplay has not been studied for any type of Arabic. This article analyses quantitative and functional aspects of diglossic and bilingual codeswitching in the personal interview style of 11 Negev Bedouin female students, focusing on their functional interaction. In the five distinct registers analysed, ratios of both diglossic and bilingual codeswitching were found to rise from childhood narratives to recounts of the period of academic studies and expository sections, with the use of Hebraisms dropping in the more formal registers. Although mixed bilingual discourse with intensive codeswitching is the default style for in-group discourse of the young generation, I show that many switches are not random, but fulfil discourse-pragmatic, communicative, social and textual functions typical of each of the registers. For example, in the narrative registers, switching may mark evaluation (commenting, explaining, self-repair, sidetracking, repetition). In both narrative and non-narrative discourse it may mark quotations, rephrasing or paraphrasing, with or without a metalinguistic introducing particle such as ‘as they say’. The result is redundancy at the referential level, with pragmatic functions of emphasizing or elaborating at the discourse level. This is in keeping with functions identified for bilingual codeswitching in general and also for diglossic codeswitching in Arabic; but it is the first effort, as far as I know, to combine analysis of the two codeswitching dimensions in any given code; and, moreover, to study the interplay of this bi-dimensional switching with relation to the stylistic factors of genre and register.

The Persian term khargāh is first attested at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century. It has often been translated as “hut” or “pavilion”, but a comprehensive overview of the historical, geographical and poetic sources points to a more precise definition. Three main conclusions can be established. First, from the beginning the term exclusively referred to the trellis tent (commonly known as yurt) first identified in a Turkic milieu in Inner Asia. Second, khargāh entered the Arabic and Persian languages through the Sāmānid court and quickly replaced the Arabic expression al-qubba al-turkiyya which was previously used to refer to this kind of tent. Third, the presence of the trellis tent in Muslim courts predates the arrival of the nomadic Saljuqs in the fifth/eleventh century. The trellis tent, associated with the cloth enclosure (or sarāparda), was already a status symbol under the Sāmānids and Būyids in the fourth/tenth century. Thus this study, which lies at the crossroads of lexicography and the history of technology, provides new elements towards a better understanding of Central Asian cultural influence on the wider ‘Abbāsid world.

This article identifies and examines processes of othering in an early Indian Buddhist ascetic text, the Pali Vinaya of the Theravādins. By means of: (1) a critical discussion of the fact that the Pali Vinaya holds several terms for the early Buddhists' ascetic others; and (2) a close reading and analysis of a small group of – easily overlooked – Pali Vinaya passages with explicit references to supposed practices of the early Buddhists' ascetic others, I make explicit two aspects of the processes of othering of the early Buddhist ascetic community. I show how through processes of othering Buddhist bhikkhus, or at the very least the monk-editors of the Pali Vinaya, both negotiated a collective identity notion, and reflected on the significance of their own practices and values in direct relation to those of their ascetic others, whether real or imagined.

The majority of the Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts from the northern part of the Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang (China) were found in an area where the local languages Tocharian A and B were spoken. In this article, the interplay of Sanskrit, the religious language, and Tocharian, the popular language, is investigated based on the example of the relationship between the Sanskrit Udānavarga and the Tocharian B Udānastotra. To this end, a reconstruction of the text of the introduction to the Udānastotra is attempted, which forms the transition from the Udānavarga to the Udānastotra proper. It is argued that this Tocharian B text was found in otherwise Sanskrit manuscripts, which suggests that speakers of Tocharian preferred certain doctrinal texts in Sanskrit.

This essay examines shifting representations of the asidhārāvrata (lit. “sword's edge observance”) across a range of Sanskrit literary and religious texts. Originally a Brāhmaṇical ascetic discipline, an observance (vrata) by this name is the earliest ritual involving sexual contact documented in the corpus of Śaiva tantras. In its tantric adaptation, an orthodox practice for the cultivation of sensory restraint was transformed into a means for supernatural attainment (siddhi). Diachronic study of the observance in three early Śaiva texts – the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, Mataṅgapārameśvara, and Brahmayāmala – reveals changes in ritual emphases, women's roles, and the nature of engagement in eroticism. Analysis of the asidhārāvrata thus sheds light on the early history of tantric sexual rituals, which by the end of the first millennium had become highly diverse. It is argued that the observance became increasingly obsolete with the rise of Śaiva sexual practices more magical, ecstatic, or gnostic in orientation.

This article seeks to show that the frequent invocation by the Qing Board of Punishments of the adage that liu yang represents an exercise of imperial benevolence outside the law is not a mere formality without substantive meaning, but rather reflects the role played by the adage in the reasoning by which permission to remain at home to support an elderly or sick parent was granted or withheld. The Board may argue either that “benevolence” supplies a reason for a grant of liu yang in a given case or, on the contrary, that “benevolence” should not be extended to permit such a result. In addition, the article examines the role of the concepts of “pity” and “filial piety” in relation to the operation of “benevolence”.

This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The Persian-language copper-plates appear from the sixteenth century onwards, and seem to be later copies of (or extracts from) paper-based charters issued by Bahmani sultans and other kingdoms in the Deccan. Issues of authenticity and forgeries, fakes and copies are also raised in this paper. This study examines objects that combine material culture and textual content. While the textual content of these objects has always been privileged as being a source of history, the medium – which itself has a history of reception – has not been given its own historical narrative. The paper provides new perspectives on what we might call the “social life” of different documentary formats in medieval and early modern India, in particular the copper-plate grant.

In this study, a reconstruction is offered for the phonetic evolution of rhymes from Old Tibetan to modern-day Amdo Tibetan dialects. The relevant sound changes are proposed, along with their relative chronological precedence and the dating of some specific changes. Most interestingly, although Amdo Tibetan, identically to its ancestor Old Tibetan, does not have phonemic length, this study shows that Amdo Tibetan derives from an intermediate stage which, like many other Tibetan dialects, does make the distinction.

This paper investigates the uses of the deictic motion verbs in Pashto. First, the paper focuses on the Pashto verbs COME and GO. The Pashto COME verb is unique in that it requires a directional person marker. These person markers are used in specific situations, which are outlined in this paper. Furthermore, the verbal person marker and the dative argument of the motion verb can differ in person. Such person “mismatches” are explained in terms of ascendance on the Person Hierarchy and of a semantic understanding of person. Second, this paper shows that the phenomenon of directional person markers extends to all Pashto motion verbs. Finally, the paper briefly discusses how Pashto COME and GO do not align with cross-linguistic analyses of COME and GO verbs in other languages. This misalignment is credited to the unique three-way deictic split of COME.

The present article explores uses of verse in direct speech attributed to Confucius (551–479 bce) within works compiled mainly during the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). Analysing short prose narratives and dialogues, the article investigates a poeticized debate, in which versified proverbs or apothegms are employed as tools of argumentation. In addition I examine the mnemonic function of reiterated rhymes on politics, and emotive song as an expression of thwarted ambition, purportedly revealing glimpses at Confucius's inner life; and libretto-like records of dramatic encounters whose participants exchange verse. The goal of the investigation is twofold. First, it demonstrates how, in early imperial China, the image of Confucius was remoulded to fulfil different functions and satisfy diverse needs beyond his by now familiar role as philosopher and as patron saint of an intellectual tradition and state ideology. Second, it draws attention to the riches of stylistic nuance and functional variety exhibited by early Chinese writings, which have so far hardly been tapped.

This article examines the consequences of the Ming maritime expeditions led by Admiral Zheng He (1371–1433) in the early fifteenth century on Indian Ocean diplomacy, trade, and cross-cultural interactions. The presence of the powerful Ming navy not only introduced an unprecedented militaristic aspect to the Indian Ocean region, but also led to the emergence of state-directed commercial activity in the maritime world that extended from Ming China to the Swahili coast of Africa. Additionally, these expeditions stimulated the movement of people and animals across the oceanic space and might eventually have facilitated the rapid entry of European commercial enterprises into the Indian Ocean region during the second half of the fifteenth century.

This paper suggests a different approach in the study of Qing dynasty yongwu poetry, which is to analyse the cultural significance of the object in this literary subgenre instead of its lyrical essence. Taking eyeglasses as an example, this paper surveys the general development of imported and domestic eyeglasses in China from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and presents various literary interpretations assigned to this object through time. It further discusses Western and Chinese materiality, the economy and scholars' lives, political and social justification, as well as literary complexity and object identity, which are vital to the development of poetry on eyeglasses in the late imperial period.