The Mamlūk historical tradition's depiction of al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allah (386-411/996-1021), the fifth Caliph of the Fāṭimid dynasty of Egypt (296-556/909-1171), is a contradictory amalgamation of awe, confusion, and horror. Al-Ḥākim assumes effective political power by murdering Barjawān, his guardian and tutor, who was pivotal to securing the young Caliph's succession in the face of powerful military opposition. Then we are witness to al-Ḥākim's steady decline into a kind of psychosis or madness. He sits alone in the candlelight or darkness for years and orders the sūqs (markets) to remain open throughout the night. His policies range from the patently absurd (e.g. banning cobblers from making women's shoes to keep them indoors or the killing of all dogs) to the outright tyrannical (e.g. forcing Jews and Christian to wear ten pound weights around their necks). The sources express horror when recounting al-Ḥākim's sudden killing sprees, but even his greatest critics acknowledge his selfless generosity. Most compilers assert that he proclaimed his own divinity and authorised missionaries to spread this message, while others deny this allegation, pointing towards his persecution of the early Druze. In the end, we are shown al-Ḥākim riding into the hills surrounding Cairo in solitary contemplation only to vanish into thin air.

In the summer of 2001 a major controversy erupted following a Jewish Chronicle report (18 May 2001) that the Honorary Officers and Executive Committee of the Board of Deputies of British Jews had decided to offer for sale, at Messrs Christie's auction rooms in London, a hitherto unpublished work by the nineteenth-century explorer, writer and diplomat Sir Richard Francis Burton. In the event, and in the glare of worldwide media attention, the reserve price of £150,000 was not reached (6 June 2001). The lot – one of the very few Burton manuscripts still in private hands – was therefore withdrawn and returned, amidst yet further controversy, to the safe-keeping of the Board. In this article we trace the history of this work from its creation in the early 1870s, and offer some thoughts on its contemporary significance.

The adoption of western notation (which is an example of graphic notation) as the “official system” in Turkey dates from after 1828. Sultan Mahmud II (reigned 1808–1839) abolished the Janissary force in 1826 and with it the musical unit of that army, it was a band for wind and percussion instruments (Mehterhâne-i Hümâyûn). He then organised his new army on western lines and thus introduced an institution of western origin, the military band, as the musical unit of his modern army. This new institution, which was European in its music system, instruments, repertoire and first and foremost its methods of education, was formed under the name Muzika-i Hümâyûn (the royal military band). Professional musicians were invited from Europe to participate and, with the foundation of Muzika-i Hümâyûn in 1827, the most far-reaching change in Turkish musical history took place. It was an outstanding manifestation of westernisation which necessarily made a deep impact on both the Turkish makam (modal) music system and the existence and the behaviour of the musicians who produced and performed it. The domination of makam music and its masters in court circles and their claim to be the sole and absolute system of taste was undermined, although the appreciation and respect of certain sultans and bureaucrats continued on a personal level. From that date on, a duality, an East-West dichotomy (the effects of which can still be seen), overtook the cultural sphere of which music was a part. Within this dichotomy, tonal polyphonic music of the West began to make its influence felt at least as much as, if not more than, makam based Turkish music both within the state framework and in the society at large. These dual concepts were referred to as Alla Turca and Alla Franga. While Alla Franga (alafranga in common parlance) came to symbolise modernity, change and the new life style, Alla Turca (alaturka in common parlance) became a manifestation of being archaic and conservative and of having a blind commitment to tradition and an under-developed taste (even no taste at all). Within this series of dichotomies, which took hold of every area of life (from literature to fashion also, eating habits, systems of beliefs, and education as well as government) makam based Turkish music received a large share of “cultural negation” with the judgement that it did not even have a decent notation system. It became marginalised and restricted to a narrow social group deeply and passionately devoted to it. Even during this process, makam music developed a dynamic of self-protection against “cultural negation” with its composers, theorists, publishers, performers and listening public. Makam music composers and performers learnt western notation, they wrote pieces down and deciphered music from that notation; a system of education based on modern methods developed while still preserving meşk (the traditional oral teaching method of Turkish music). These efforts were driven by the ‘ideal’ of transforming makam music, which was claimed to be archaic due to its monodic structure, into a polyphonic music. The musicians who knew western notation (such as Melekzet Efendi, Leon [Hancıyan] Efendi, etc.) were paid great amounts of money in order to record the works of the old masters in western notation and compile them, along with new compositions, into extensive note-collections (such as Muzika-i Hümâyûn Kumandanı [the commander of the royal military band] Necîp Paşa Collection and the Pertev Paşa Collection, etc.). Works were also published in note editions (such as Mâlûmat [literally meaning knowledge], Müntehâbât [literally meaning selections], Ûdî [lute-player] Arşak editions, etc.). Moreover, educational guides devoted to teaching makam theory and solmisation (such as Tanbûrî Cemîl Bey's Rehber-i Mûsikî [The Music Guide], Muallim [teacher] İsmail Hakkı Bey's Mahzen-i Esrâr-ı Mûsikî [The Cellar of the Secrets of Music], Muallim Kâzım Bey's Mûsikî Nazariyâtı [Music Theory], etc.) and the first methods for learning the instruments of makam music (such as Ûdî Salâhî Bey's Ud metodu [Lute Method], Seyyid Abdülkaadir Bey's Usûl-i Ta'lîm-i Keman [Method for Practising Violin, etc.], modelled on their European counterparts, were beginning to be published.

Acre is situated on the northern Mediterranean coast of Israel, about 13 km to the north of Haifa. Its history since the twentieth century bce has been well-documented. Until the third century bce it stood on a mound called Tel al-Fukhar. From the Hellenistic period the city developed on the plain to the west of this mound. Acre experienced two important phases during its long existence. The first was during the Hellenistic era, when it occupied the mound, the plain, and the rocky peninsula to the south of the western sector of the plain. The second was during the Crusader period, when it occupied an even larger area. Between these two periods, the city declined, although it was still repeatedly referred to in historical sources.

The literature on medicine in medieval Muslim countries in general and in Egypt in particular is vast and detailed. Yet study and assessment of the practical aspects of medicine in the Mediterranean society of the Middle Ages requires examination of authentic, practical medical knowledge. At present this can be extracted mainly from the prescriptions found in the Cairo Genizah; these supply a different and valuable dimension. On the importance and the potential of research into the medical aspects of the Genizah documents, mainly prescriptions, Goitein wrote in 1971 that “these prescriptions have to be examined by experts in the history of medicine”.

This article considers two well-known texts that deal with questions of education and appropriate conduct for respectable Muslims in colonial India. The texts under scrutiny are Mirat al-Arus (The Bride's Mirror), and the Taubat-al-Nasuh (Repentance of Nasuh), completed in 1867–68 and 1873 respectively. The author was a Muslim publicist and a prolific writer who published numerous books in diverse genres. Nazir Ahmed (1830–1912) came from a family of distinguished maulavis and muftis of Bijnor (in the state of Uttar Pradesh) and Delhi. His father, a teacher in a small town near Bijnor, taught him Persian and Arabic. In 1846, Nazir Ahmad enrolled at the Delhi College and studied there till 1853. He began his career as a maulavi in Arabic, but soon (in 1856) became a deputy inspector of schools in the Department of Public Instruction. Later, after he had produced a superb translation of the Indian Penal Code in Urdu, he was nominated for the Revenue Service. He was posted as deputy collector in what was then called the North-West Provinces (i.e. modern U.P.), whence the name ‘Diptee (Deputy) Nazir Ahmad’ by which he is popularly known.

In the pages of the Islamic chronicles which tell of the deeds of the crusaders, one figure stands apart. A man who not only is said to have attacked pilgrim caravans in a time of truce and insulted Muhammad himself, but who also, it is reported, had the audacity, temerity, and insanity (or possible genius) to threaten the very heart of the Islamic world – the cities of Mecca and Medina, and the ‘Islamic’ Red Sea. This man was Reynald of Châtillon, lord of Oultrejourdain, erstwhile Prince of Antioch, and he is described, amongst other things, as “one of the most devilish of the Franks, and one of the most demonic, and he had the strongest hostility to the Muslims”. The raid on the Red Sea and purported attempts to attack Mecca and Medina are believed to be one of the main reasons why Reynald is so despised in the Arabic chronicles. The intention of this article, therefore, is to examine the raid anew, using the Arabic material available, in order to try to contribute to an understanding of the raid, and to establish whether, indeed, Reynald even did try to attack the holy cities of Islam, and whether the criticism of him is justified.

Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and the consolidation of the Kemalist regime in 1926, the President of the new republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk launched a reform process which aimed at changing Turkey's laws, administration, culture and, most significantly, its image. One facet of this process of transformation was the language reform that commenced with romanisation of the Turkish script in late 1928 and reached its zenith later on in the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1934, the Türk Dil Kurumu – the Turkish Language Institute, a radical reformist institution founded by Atatürk in 1932 – banished thousands of Arabic and Persian words from spoken and written Turkish and fabricated new, ‘authentically’ Turkish, words to replace them. The radical-reformist zeal subsided in 1935 as a result of the linguistic chaos of the previous years and came to a halt in 1936 with the proclamation of the so-called Sun-Language Theory. However, so much had changed during those few years and has done since, that even secondary school and university graduates in contemporary Turkey are not able to read and understand, for instance, Atatürk's famous Speech of 1926 from its original, and hence feel the need to consult ‘modernised’ or simplified versions. In this respect, the legacy of the language reform in early republican Turkey remains a matter of bitter controversy and pits the reformist Kemalists against an array of Islamists, conservatives and even liberals. The current debate on what proper Turkish is neatly overlaps with the major fault line that still divides Turkish society.

With the exception of a minor mention, which Sharaf Khān (b.1543) made in the Sharafnāma, the first information about the most southern group of Kurdish tribes in Iranian Kurdistan, the Lek, first became available to modern readers in Bustān al-Sīyāḥa, a geographical and historical Persian text by Shīrwānī (1773–1832). These hitherto unknown Lek communities, were probably settled in north-western and northern Luristan, known as Lekistan, by order of Shāh ‘Abbās, who wished in this way to create some support for Ḥusayn Khān, the wālī of Luristan. Many of the centres of Lekî intellectual life in the late Afshārīd and early Zand period, which is also of much importance in that the Zand dynasty arose from it, are located in this geographical area. One has only to call to mind the names of such places as Alishtar (Silsila), Kūhdasht, Khāwa, Nūr Ābād, Uthmānwand and Jalālwand in the most southern districts of Kirmānshāh, and also the Lek tribes of eastern Īlām. The very mention of these cities and villages already sets in motion in one's imagination the parade of Twelver Shiites, Ahl-i Haqq heretics, and non-religious oral literary councils which constitutes the history of Lekî new era. But unfortunately little of this is known in the West and Lekî literature remains one of the neglected subjects of literary and linguistic Kurdish studies. This important oral literature and also some written manuscripts are unpublished and untranslated into western languages. The subject of this article is the translation of Zîn-ə Hördemîr, as an example of a genre of Lekî written literature which also provides linguistic data for the Lekî dialect of southern Kurdish.

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

In 1850, a paper was read before the Royal Historical Society of Ireland regarding a group of Chinese porcelain seals that had come to light during the previous eighty years in Ireland. In total there were about sixty seals which it was claimed had been discovered in various places throughout Ireland, ranging from Belfast all the way to Cork. In addition to their wide dispersion pattern, the seals were found in the strangest places – in an orchard, a cave, bogs, and so on. The discovery could not be easily explained at the time and when the inscriptions turned out to be written in the Chinese seal script, a number of fanciful hypotheses were advanced as to how these seals “of great antiquity” appeared in Ireland. According to these explanations, the seals were either brought over by the Phoenicians, or by ancient Irish tribes after their wanderings in China, or by mediaeval Irish monks travelling from the Middle East. All along, the emphasis was on the extent to which these artefacts corroborated Ireland's ancient connection with the Orient, an idea that was believed and promoted at the time by both Irish nationalists and English imperialists. Both sides, albeit from a different standpoint and driven by different motives, saw the Irish as a distinctly non-European culture, whose ancestors must have originated from distant lands far beyond the perimeters of western civilisation.

We owe to Zoroaster one of the oldest religions of mankind. We cannot call Zoroaster's doctrine a world religion in the strict sense, for it did not spread far beyond the limits of the Iranian world, nor did its followers spread over the world as the Parsis do now and the Manichaeans once did. But many ideas first expressed by Zoroaster or his followers, such as the all-encompassing dualism of good and evil, light and darkness, or the resurrection of the dead in the flesh, or the responsibility of mankind for the fate of this world and the world beyond, have influenced, from the middle of the first millennium BCE on, the spirituality of the near eastern peoples and so also the religions of Judaism, and by way of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, too. This is sufficient to grant the religion of Zoroaster a most important position in the history of human religiosity.

§1: AVP 2.19. §2.Dṛtiin the Vedas and Later2a. AVP 2.19.3: Hoffmann's Correction ofdṛtyṃTOdhṛtyṃ. 2b. The Meanings ofdṛti2c. the Irregular Feminine Gender2d.The Shape of thedṛti. 2e.Inflateddṛtis as Floats. Abbreviations and Bibliography. Picture of a dṛti in use.

The commitment of North-West Frontier Province Pakhtun religious politics towards the quest for a society and state governed by religious leaders was directed through the colonial period, and into the national period, predominantly by the ulama known as Deobandis. These ulama took their title from the madrasa Darul Ulum Deoband in the United Provinces in north-India and came to prominence through championing Muslim interests in colonial NWFP. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the United Provinces remained in India, separating Pakistani scholars trained in Deoband from Indian Deobandi theologians, and indeed from the school itself. But these ulama continued to call themselves Deobandis and were central to the successful demand for the constitutional declaration of Pakistan as an Islamic state; and brought Islam to bear on national and provincial legislation from positions in parliament. Increasingly well-organised and well-funded, NWFP Deobandi ulama established madrasas and mosques in the province, strengthening the preserve of religion and their own authority. When the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation began in 1978, a section of the resistance organisation working in exile in Peshawar gravitated towards these Deobandi institutions, drawing the Deobandi ulama of the NWFP into the jihad. Sustaining links to the Afghan fighters even after the withdrawal of the Soviets, the NWFP Deobandis contributed to and encouraged the emerging organisation of the Taliban, becoming champions of their reactionary brand of Islam.

In contrast to many regions of the Middle East, where Jewish communities existed at the time of the Prophet and throughout the centuries following his death, the Tamil region of south India and the Indonesian-Malay world lacked such populations. The absence of Jewish communities did not, however, imply a complete unfamiliarity with Jews and Judaism. Rather, their image emerged from a variety of textual sources in lieu of direct encounters. In addition to their depictions in the Qur'an and hadith literature, Jewish figures occasionally appeared in texts produced in these regions' local languages. The Book of One Thousand Questions, composed in Arabic and translated thereafter into many languages – including Javanese, Malay and Tamil – offers a glimpse to portrayals of Jews and Judaism in lands where their actual presence was virtually unknown.

There has appeared a new trend in recent scholarship on the early modern Islamic world that analyzes the role of gender and sexuality in society and culture. Ruby Lal and Rosalind O'Hanlon have investigated women and gender roles in the sixteenth-century Mughal harem and the broader imperial court respectively. Mehmed Kalpaklı, Walter Andrews, and Khaled El-Rouayheb have studied the nature or the implications of sexual relationship among men in Istanbul as well as the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi have read Safavid and Qajar literature and visual arts through the lens of gender and power politics. Together these scholars have successfully highlighted the relevance of this methodology particularly in its application to the narrative sources that comprise the bulk of our documentations for the period (except for the Ottoman case of course), and it is to subject to such an approach a brief, but crucial, period in early Mughal history and historiography that the present article now proceeds.

Since the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate underwent a form of apotheosis after his death, it is not surprising that a hagiographic tradition was quick to establish itself. This tradition attributed superhuman qualities to Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), and its lingering influence is still to be seen. His admirers paid particular attention to his supposed bookishness, the object being to demonstrate that his sinological learning rendered him fit to rule according to the Chinese construction of the desired attributes of a ruler. For those who came later, this bookishness served in retrospect to mark him out from his successors, but for his contemporaries it detached questions of legitimacy and fitness to rule from his recent successes on the battlefield and it defined fitness to rule in accordance with the sinological leanings of the new samurai élite.