This paper involves an syncretic study of the structural characteristics, semantic stratification, graphical evolution and contextual analysis on a chronological base of the perplexing graphs and words which designate the Chinese, such as xia, hua and zhongguo, non-Chinese, such as yi, di, rong, and man, in early palaeographic and documentary sources. It shows how these terms evolved to distinguish between the two distinct ethnographical concepts in the early mind.

The study shows that the conception of Hua-Xia and Zhongguo carried different connotations in the Western Zhou period from that defined in Spring and Autumn philological sources. The relocation of the Zhou capital to the east during the transition from Western to Eastern Zhou had generically diffused the concept of Xia and the elegant Ya culture. The conception of Xia and Yi, which had formerly distinguished between the Zhou elites and the non-Zhou people, came to distinguish between the central states and peripheral groups in the geographical sense, as well as between the Zhou subjects and the non-Zhou subjects in the political sense. Thus the conceptualisation of the so-called “Chinese-ness” postdates the actual formation of the ethnographical bulk of the Chinese people.

A study of historical, political and religious thought of the early Mongols undertaken during the last few years has provided a thesis that, during the period of their world domination in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they initiated an original universal concept with the purpose of substantiating and justifying the world's largest land empire. Furthermore, this concept was so developed that it constituted a cohesive theory that can be called Tenggerism or Heavenism.

South of Arṣūf-Apollonia, on the western edge of the modern city of Herzliya (Israel), at the top of a limestone hill overlooking the sea, stands a rectangular fortress-like building (Fig. 1), commonly known as Mashhad Sayyidnā ‘Alī – a name derived from that of ‘Alī b. ‘Alīm, who lies buried there. The story of Sayyidnā ‘Alī, which I would like to set forth in this article, combines three intertwined aspects that shed light on Muslim Palestine and Syria (bilād al-shām) in the Middle Ages.

This article deals with thunder magic during the time of emperor Sung Hui-tsung (r.1100-1126), focusing on theoretical expositions (Discourse on the Thunders) by Wang Wen-ch'ing (1093-1153). Thunder magic is a general term that summarises a large array of exorcist practices in Heavenly Masters Taoism (Cheng-i tao). Court Taoists like Wang Wen-ch'ing sublimated with literary means such practices that in a stunning way resembled shaman methods that were designed to avert disasters like droughts. Wang Wen-ch'ing used the Book of Changes and some astronomical notions in order to formulate his Discourse on the Thunders, describing the workings of the cosmos that set the frame for ritual interferences in terms of Taoist thunder magic. The article shows the actual application of these theoretical notions in religion. The author translates and interprets relevant texts, which all are taken from the canonical collection Tao-fa hui-yüan. These texts show the way Wang Wen-ch'ing identifies the cosmos with divine forces that can be addressed and administered by thunder rituals. Taoist priests even today know and use such ritual methods, which prove thunder magic to be a living religious tradition.

“An oriental Samuel Pepys”. The phrase has been lodged in my mind for the several decades during which I have been working, on and off, on this early Persian historian Bayhaqī. I am pretty certain that I read it originally in that monument of mid-Victorian Anglo-Indian scholarship, The History of India as told by its own Historians. The Muhammadan period, by Sir Henry Elliott and John Dowson. This multi-volume work consists of translated extracts, many quite lengthy, from texts illustrating the history of the Indian subcontinent, the greater part of them dealing with what was then some eleven centuries of Muslim rule there. In Volume II, the compilers presented several passages from Bayhaqī's work, The History of Sultan Maʿsūd of Ghazna, which had just appeared in a printed edition at Calcutta in the Bibliotheca Indica series, edited by the person who had in fact produced the pioneer catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society's Arabic and Persian manuscripts, William H. Morley. Elliott made many translations himself, but sometimes employed local munshis, not always with happy results. Although Persian culture was still very much alive in India in the mid-nineteenth century, these munshis were far from being au fait with the early eleventh-century Persian style of Bayhaqī and were at times flummoxed by his idiomatic usages. One of my favourites here is the Persian saying ṭablī zīr-i gilīm mīzadand, translated literally and ludicrously in its context as “they were beating a drum under a carpet”. Why anyone should crawl under a carpet and beat a drum, in the midst of a high-level discussion between Sultan Maʿsūd and his administrators, the equivalent of a cabinet meeting, is rather baffling; the idiom, already used by Firdawsī in the national epic, the Shāh-nāma, means of course “to spread rumours clandestinely”.

The interpretation of the Rigveda presents enormous problems for Vedic scholars, as Stephanie Jamison recently acknowledged in a paper on translating the Rigveda delivered at the Eleventh UCLA Indo-European Conference held in 1999. “It is discouragingly common to find passages in the Rig Veda that do not make sense without the silent supplying of additional material.” (2000: 13)

The Mongols' relationship with the Ismâ'îlîs or Assassins has generally been considered in terms of their destruction of the Ismâ'îlî power in Northern Iran under Hülegü. While this was certainly the denouement of their relationship, the Mongols and the so-called Assassins have a much longer common history. Indeed, they often shared mutual enemies in the person of the Khwarazmshah Muhammad, and then of his son, Jalâl al-Dîn. This article, thus, examines the pattern of the Mongol-Ismâ'îlî relationship from their first contact to the severing of ties, and discusses whether the Mongols established an alliance with the Assassins.

Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in all forms of human society. Based on a system of mutual obligation, they denote any activity in which valuables are circulated between individuals or groups of people. In the religious sphere they include the transfer of both material and immaterial goods between human and spiritual beings. As outlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don, the classic work on the total system of reciprocity, such exchange is governed by the principle of the gift entailing the counter-gift.

The exhibition of decorative and industrial arts that was held in Jaipur in 1883 under the patronage of Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II (1880–1922) brought together the work of artists and craftsmen from many regions of India, but gave special treatment to the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, and to the pupils of Jaipur's own recently established School of Art. It led to the establishment of a permanent museum of industrial arts in Jaipur, which still exists and continues to hold many of the original exhibits. One of many ambitious exhibitions that followed in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Jaipur Exhibition was the first such to be held in an Indian state, coinciding with the International Exhibition in Calcutta and preceding the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London of 1886.

Modern Farsi historically possessed an underlying opposition of vowel length that has since largely disappeared in all but open, non-final syllables. At the same time, qualitative differences have arisen between the once identical short and long vowels. Two opposing analyses have been proposed to account for these facts. The “quantity only” analysis posits an underlying opposition of length and derives the qualitative differences by rule, while the “quality only” analysis removes length from the underlying representation but includes the differences in quality. In this paper, it is argued that neither analysis is able to describe the vowel system both concretely and with maximal generalisation. A synthetic analysis is proposed that integrates quantity and quality in the underlying vowel system and is able to account adequately for the observed phenomena. It moreover sheds light on the modern Farsi vowel system as a transition state between the historical “quantity only” system and the system of a future Farsi possessing an opposition of quality alone.

In his Islam in Modern History, published in 1957, yet still a work remarkable for its insights, Wilfred Cantwell Smith refers to the extraordinary energy which had surged through the Muslim world with increasing force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He talks of:

dynamism, the appreciation of activity for its own sake, and at the level of feeling a stirring of intense, even violent, emotionalism…The transmutation of Muslim society from its early nineteenth-century stolidity to its twentieth-century ebullience is no mean achievement. The change has been everywhere in evidence.

This surge of energy is closely associated with a shift in the balance of Muslim piety from an other-worldly towards a this-worldly focus. By this I mean a devaluing of a faith of contemplation of God's mysteries and of belief in His will to shape human life, and a valuing instead of a faith in which Muslims were increasingly aware that it was they, and only they, who could act to fashion an Islamic society on earth. This shift of emphasis has been closely associated with a new idea of great power, the caliphate of man. In the absence of Muslim power, in the absence, for the Sunnis at least, of a caliph, however symbolic, to guide, shape and protect the community, this awesome task now fell to each individual Muslim. I hazard to suggest that this shift towards a this-worldly piety, and the new responsibilities for Muslims that came with it, is the most important change that Muslims have wrought in the practice of their faith over the past one thousand years. It is a change full of possibilities for the future.

Over the course of the past several decades, Francis Robinson has done much to illuminate facets of the history and culture of the traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, of South Asia. “For far too long,” he writes, “[the] ulama have been treated as cardboard figures, caricatures of Muslim men of God…. [C]olonial administrators, and subsequently scholars, have rarely known enough to treat them as more than such; Western-educated Muslims, who have discovered new forms of authority, have often been concerned both to mock and to distance themselves from the mediators of religious authority; and the followers of ulama have been concerned to impose upon them an image of an ideal teacher and scholar at the cost of concealing aspects of their character, personality, and behaviour” (TheUlama of Farangi Mahall [hereafter FM], p. 148). The cost of letting the caricatures persist is high. In many instances, an understanding of the Muslim public sphere and of religious thought in modern Islam remains at best incomplete without serious attention to the ulama. And important facets of religious change likewise remain elusive unless the evolving discourses and the institutions of the ulama are brought within our purview. When more observers of Muslim societies come to recognise the ways in which the ulama are integral to the history of modern and not just of medieval Islam, it would be in some measure due to the influence of Robinson's writings. Among other things, Robinson's work is significant for its insistence that we consider how religious ideas, norms, and traditions shape politics instead of treating them as little more than symbols employed by the political elite for purposes of mass political mobilisation. At the same time, he has explored how religious identities and institutions have themselves evolved in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. And with the history and culture of the ulama as his primary point of reference, he has brought to light new perspectives on Islam in South Asia, as well as on the historical interaction between South Asia and the Muslim world at large.

This paper is named and given in memory of Mark Zebrowski, friend and respected colleague, who contributed much to life, art history and the culture of India, including his pioneering Gold, silver and bronze from Mughal India. I will focus on the brass vessels inlaid with silver and gold which were produced for one Mamluk sultan, al-Nāṣir Muhammad (1293–4, 1299–1309, 1310–41), whose name and titles are inscribed on more than forty-six objects (see Appendix).

The Royal Asiatic Society was founded in March 1823. The practice of holding meetings at which papers were given and discussed commenced the following month in April of that year. Throughout the first decade of the Society's existence, these orally delivered papers were later printed and distributed in substantial quarto volumes entitled ‘Transactions’.

I should like to begin by thanking the Honorary Treasurer for his admirably succinct report for 2003. I would like to assure you that Council takes his main points very seriously, that is the need to eliminate the current deficit of around £35k, and the connected imperative to move to a more suitable building in a more suitable location. Over the past seven years the Honorary Treasurer has been a great servant of the Society. On behalf of Council, and the fellowship, I thank him for his skills and for keeping us focussed on the need to act.

Once upon a time twenty nine upper middle-class friends and their wives entered a thicket where the Buddha happened to be and began to play. Another friend had no wife, so a prostitute was brought for him. While they were “disporting themselves” she took his things and ran away. The remainder joined in a search for her. Roaming in that thicket they found the Buddha seated at the root of a tree. They asked, “Lord, has the Blessed One seen a certain woman (ekam itthim)?” “What have you, young men, to do with the woman?”, he exclaimed. They explained. “Now what do you, young men, think?”, he asked, “Which is better for you, to search for a woman or to search for yourselves?” “That, Lord, would be preferable – to search for ourselves.” So he preached and gave them ordination. The story is contrived as a setting for the rhetorical question (like Mark 12:13–17).