The Ayyubid Sultan Salāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin) used the pious endowment (waqf, pl. awqāf; alternatively ḥubs, hubūs, pi. aḥbās) as a major instrument in his efforts to gain political and military control over Egypt and Syria. In pursuit of this aim, he systematically converted properties belonging to his enemies into awqāf. The present study investigates some of the legal and social aspects of Saladin's waqf policy in the territories conquered by his armies. Here, I examine Saladin's endowment policy and his political aims from the viewpoint of the Sultan and his court. I will not reflect on the motives of the beneficiaries, those people of religion (al-mu῾ammamūn; literally ‘ the turbaned’) who co-operated with him, even though ‘ mingling with the monarch’ (malik or sultān) apparently clashed with some of the principles stipulated in guides for Suḟi novices.

Much has been written about the trading relations of the Italian states with the Levant in the period of the Crusades and the late Middle Ages. The bulk of the material that has made these studies possible has been provided by the voluminous archives of the various Italian cities, which also contain a few treaties and letters that originated from Muslim authorities (largely of the Mamluk period) and have been preserved in the original and/or in translation. The document to be presented here was addressed to various officials in Tripoli, that is, Tarābulus al-Shām, and dates from near the end of the Mamluk sultanate. It is an order for the attention of the Mamluk authorities only, intended to govern commercial dealings in Tripoli as they were unilaterally understood. The document is not to be thought of as comparable with the so-called ‘treaties’, which were draw up after a process of negotiation although they were ultimately expressed as independent decrees of the Sultan. One can only wonder at the chance survival of this undoubtedly genuine piece. It is now held in the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, under the number OIM 13787. It was purchased in 1929 from Dr Bernhard Moritz, one-time librarian of the Khedivial Library in Cairo, and its provenance beyond that point is unknown. Three other Mamluk documents of the same period, which are relevant to affairs at Tripoli, survive in the archives of St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, namely nos. LXIX, LXX and LXXI of those published by Ernst. The first of these three refers to the monastery's waqf property at Tripoli, but the other two have absolutely no connection with any interests or affairs of the monastery, and it is difficult to imagine how they found their way there.

The revival of the Dhahabī order in modern Persia took place several decades earlier than that of the Ni'matullāhī through the person of Quṭb al-Dīn Nayrīzī (d. 1173/1759), the thirty-second in line from the Prophet. Nayrīzī was well-versed in all of the various Islamic sciences of his day and among his followers are counted a number of notable Shiite clerics, such as Shaykh Jaՙfar Najafī, Mullā Miḥrab Gīlānī, Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥs¯'ī and Sayyid Mahdī Ṭabāṭaba'ī (‘Baḥr al- ՙUlum’). In the Tadhkirat al-awliyā-yi Dhahabiyya, a versified history of the Dhahabī masters by Āqā Mīrẓā Bābā Shīrāzī, the studies, exploits, compositions, charismatic powers and travels of Nayrīzī are recorded in detail. Nayrīzī was also the author of numerous poetical works and prose treatises in Persian and Arabic, including Risāla-yi Faṣl al-khiṭāb, Shams al-ḥikma, Kanz al-ḥikma, Anwār al-wilāya, Nūr al-hidāya and Risāla-yi ՙIshqiyya. ‘Faṣl al-khiṭāb’, his celebrated Arabic poem of some 8,000 couplets, expounds the tenets of Akbarian theosophy and details his mystical experiences. While attacking the corruption of the Safavid clerical establishment, it records in detail the persecution endured by the Sufis and the destruction of their khānaqāhs at the hands of the ՙulamā-yi ẓāhir.5 Nayrīzī's Faṣl al-khiṭāb also apparently formed the literary model for Hādī Sabzavārā's (d. 1878) celebrated Arabic Manẓūma-yi Ḥikmat.

Recent work on the impact of print on Muslim societies has been much concerned with debating how conceptions and structures of religious authority may have been altered, and a new era of religious change inaugurated, through this technology. It was only in the nineteenth century—the latter half of that century in case of the Indian subcontinent—that print came to be wholeheartedly embraced by the Muslim religious élite as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of their ideas. Some scholars have emphasized the role of print in enabling the ՙulam¯' to reach wider audiences than could ever be conceivable in a manuscript age. Though print threatened to undermine the age-old styles of person to person transmission of knowledge, and conceptions of authoritative transmission associated with those styles, what the ՙulamā' gained was not only a new, effective, and—compared to the costs of the manuscript age—relatively inexpensive medium to reach and influence new audiences, but also access to religious classics which were hitherto available only to a select few, but which would now undergird new movements of revival and reform in their societies. While acknowledging these aspects of the impact of print, other scholars have seen the adverse effect of print on ‘traditional’ religious authority to be the more noteworthy. Precisely because religious classics were now accessible, often through translations into the vernacular, the special claims of the ՙulamā' as the guardians and authoritative interpreters of religious texts came to be disputed. As Francis Robinson has put it, ‘Increasingly from now on any Ahmad, Mahmud or Muhammad could claim to speak for Islam.’

The date of the demise, or (Mahapāri)Nirvāṉa, of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni is one of the key chronological markers in early Indian history, one which has therefore been of pivotal importance to modern scholarship on ancient India. Whilst the dates of the conquest of Gandhāara and Sindh by the Achaemenid empire and the dates of Alexander's campaigns in the subcontinent are among the very oldest established for the history of north-western India, that of the Nirvāna of the Buddha has long been regarded as the oldest more or less fixed chronological value in the history of north-eastern India. The dating of the Buddha has a crucial significance for the dates of certain ancient Indian kings-Bimbisara of Magadha and Prasenajit (Pasenadi) of Kosala -and for that of the Jain Tīrthaṅkara Mahāvīra, for the development of Jainism and the Śramaṉa movement, and for the earlier history of the Brahmanical religion and the oldest Indian philosophy, including the thought of the Upaniṣads. Moreover, quite apart from its importance for South Asia alone, the consensus (apparently) obtaining among scholars about the time of the Buddha contributed to the elaboration by Karl Jaspers, in his book of 1955 entitled Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, of the concept of an Axial Age (‘Achsenzeit’) around 500 B.C. when a number of epoch-making events are thought to have taken place in the ancient Eurasian world.

Kalam Kohistani is a Dardic language spoken in the upper parts of the Swat and Panjkora valleys (Swat Kohistan and Dir Kohistan), in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. In the literature, the language is known by different names, the most familiar of which are Garwi and Bashkarik. The name Garwi occurs in the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI, 8/2: 507ff.), while Bashkarik is used by Morgenstierne (1940), which is the standard reference on the language to date.

The dissolution of ideological identities that had seemed since the middle of this century fairly stable would appear to be one of the characteristics of our times. In place of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism, Samuel Huntingdon would wish to erect a more fragmented competition between civilizational blocs, bearing such labels as the Confucian East and the World of Islam. Yet even such an analysis seems already distinctly old-fashioned, imposing a questionable cultural stability on more labile phenomena. As an alternative Lionel Jensen suggests that the first of these labels, at any rate, is in no small measure the creation of early European observers, and that far from basking in any unproblematic sense of identity, some of the best minds of twentieth-century China actually expended much of their ink on a highly problematic search for the origins of an identifiable Confucian group in the early Chinese past.

Through work on the large collection of Mandaic lead rolls in the British Museum and collations of incantation bowls in various museums and libraries, it appears that Mandaic gnostic incantation formulas were often translated into Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, but not the reverse. In Late Antiquity, Mandaic Vorlagen seem to have dominated the field of magic in Mesopotamia. Although, only a scanty amount of pre-Islamic Mandaic incantation material has been published so far, classical Mandaic literature already gives many hints of this fact. It turns out that many solutions to puzzling words or spellings in Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls can be explained in the light of a Mandaic Vorlage.