The conversion of Ghazan Khan to Islam in A.H. 694/A.D. 1295 was an event of great importance for both the Mongol ruling class and the Muslim subjects of his kingdom. The story of this conversion, based primarily on semi-official Persian works emanating from the Īlkhānid state itself, has been retold and analysed in varying detail by several modern scholars. Recently, Dr. Charles Melville, using contemporary Arabic sources from the Mamluk Sultanate, has enriched our knowledge of this event; in addition, he has suggested that the Islamization of the Mongols may have been well advanced even before Ghazan's conversion. Melville deals mainly with Ghazan's conversion per se, as well as the events that led up to it. As for the nature of Ghazan's Islam, he writes: ‘It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on the sincerity of Ghazan's conversion, which we can never know, or on what he actually understood of Islam …’. He does show, however, that Ghazan's conversion to Islam was more than just a personal decision based on religious conviction: one motive behind this move was a desire to attract those Mongols who had already become Muslims, and thus to win their support in his struggle against Baidu.

It is some time since a book has been published which focuses entirely on Sasanian Zoroastrianism, and one from Professor Shaul Shaked, who has studied the religion at this period for many years, is sure of eager attention. The Sasanian epoch naturally attracts scholars approaching Zoroastrian studies from the Persian or Semitic fields; and the author points moreover to its interest for students of religions more generally, since this was a time when a number of other faiths were jostling for place within Iran, from Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity to the ill-fated but then vigorously expanding Manichaeism, and lesser ones of diverse hues. All this, and ‘an openness to Greek scientific and philosophical ideas’, made for as ‘lively and diversified a period of intellectual and religious activity as could ever be found in ancient Iran’ (p. 12).

In the Hindu pantheon the goddess Rādhā, Krsna's milkmaid lover and consort, is a relative newcomer. Notwithstanding her ‘youth’, she has already attracted scholarly attention (Hawley and Wulff, 1982; Olson, 1983; Kinsley, 1986 and 1989). The interest in this goddess has to do with her ambiguous relation with the male god with whom she is associated; though she has no independent existence from her ‘Viṣṇu’, she is not completely submissive to him either. In fact, Rādhā's devotees affirm her superiority over Kṛṣṇa. The relation between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa certainly is not always portrayed as one eternal happy fulfilment (saṃbhoga-śṛṅgāra). One of the basic traits of this goddess is her suffering, mainly on account of his (real or imagined) unfaithfulness. It is in fact the very stubborn strength of her love that forms the basis for Rādhā's exaltation as a model of devotion. Ironically, with the rise her status, the need to provide an end to her suffering increases. Blissful union with her lover is clearly felt to be the prerogative for a great goddess, and with that the inevitable marital status is only one step away. In this paper I propose to discuss the historical moment when this ‘happy ending’ becomes important.

The Pali Text Society has most usefully brought together as Collected papers, v, another 16 of K. R. Norman's recent articles on MIA and Pali philological problems; and as Selected papers on Pāli studies, 18 of O. von Hinüber's German-medium articles which, published between 1967 and 1987, have also signally advanced our understanding of the origins and transmission of Pali texts. For the reissue, the latter have been rendered into English, partly by their author, and updated mainly by annotation.

Most people are born with the natural ability to see and distinguish the colours of objects and things in everyday life, but to explain in words what colour is, is a more complicated matter. Scientists have generally accepted that, physically, colour is the visual aspect of electromagnetic radiant energy having a spectral composition ranging in wavelength from about 380 to about 720 nanometres. From the psychological point of view, it is a sensation produced on the eye and in the brain by rays of light when resolved by selective reflection. The problems raised by the study of colour use are thus interdisciplinary.

Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights in the eighteenth century brought to the wider European readership an awareness of the wealth of written folk literature of medieval provenance in the Near and Middle East. During the Romantic movement, popular translations or rewritings from Arabic, Turkish and Persian medieval folk literatures proliferated (see Appendix 1 below, Chauvin, no. 6; Marzolph, no. 10).

This short article deals with the emigration of ՙUtba b. Abī Waqqāṣ (or ՙUtba b. Mālik), a member of the Quraysh subdivision named Banū Zuhra, from Mecca to Medina, which occurred several years before the Hijra of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions. ՙUtba's famous brother, Saՙd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, belonged to the inner circle of Companions surrounding the Prophet Muḥammad from early on in his career. ՙUtba, by contrast, fought against the Prophet at Uՙud and probably died a pagan.

The Saṅghāṭasūtra (Sgh) is one of the most extensively preserved Old Khotanese texts, together with the Book of Zambasta (Z) and the Suvarṇabhāsasūtra (Suv).1 Unlike Z which is known chiefly from one manuscript and only a few fragmentary variants from other manuscripts, the Sgh is represented by a large number of fragments belonging to several manuscripts. We now have Giotto Canevascini to thank for the publication of virtually all the extant manuscript material belonging to the Khotanese Sgh, originally the author's doctoral dissertation prepared under the supervision of R. E. Emmerick and submitted in 1992 at the University of Hamburg.2 It constitutes a major contribution to Khotanese research and to Iranian and Buddhist studies as well: it is of note, for instance, that Canevascini could demonstrate that the oldest manuscript of Sgh already contains textual corruptions revealing that it is actually a copy from a still older manuscript (p. xv), and that his chronological arrangement of the manuscripts provides definitive evidence that the spellings g, ś and ṣ precede, in Old Khotanese, the spellings gg, śś and ṣṣ (pp. xv–xvi) as suggested by E. Leumann, Buddhistische Literatur, nordarisch und deutsch, I. Teil, Nebenstücke (Leipzig, 1920), 92 (cf. Ṡgs., xix).