This paper introduces the exchange of letters in early Sufism, analyses the significance of these exchanges, and examines these documents not for their general literary qualities or for theoretical discussion of appropriate conduct but, rather, for actual data relating to personal and interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the crucial need for creating a corpus of Sufi letters and pieces of correspondence. The discussion is divided into methodological and conceptual-historical perspectives. The methodological perspective includes a survey of sources, the question of transmission, letter fragment usage by later authors, and a reconstruction attempt of the actual circumstances of these documents. The conceptual-historical perspective analyses content, rhetoric, argumentation forms, and self-representation.

This essay analyses the sole extant chapter of a fourth/tenth-century Faḍā'il al-Ṣaḥaba work by the ḥadı̄th critic and scholar Al-Ḥasan ʿAlı̄ ibn ʿUmar ibn Aḥmad Ibn Mahdı̄ ibn Masʿūd al-Dāraquṭnı̄ (d. 385/995). As scholars have noted, faḍā’il literature beyond the chapters on religious merits of the Companions in the Ṣaḥı̄ḥayn is among a number of sub-genres of tradition-based literature (alongside, for example, targhı̄b wa tarhı̄b), which tends largely to be comprised of weak, non-canonical ḥadı̄th. This has generally been interpreted as evidence of the acceptability of “lower standards” for the inclusion of ḥadı̄th in exhortatory or edifying literature (lower when compared to standards for the authentication of ḥadı̄th in relation to law). This conceptualization both centres law as the dominant lens through which to view the reception of ḥadı̄th in general, and contributes to the marginalization of faḍā’il literature as merely folkloric. Using a history of emotions perspective to elucidate the nature and mechanisms of edification and pious instruction in faḍā’il texts, this essay argues that far from being marginal, faḍā’il works were central to the formation of emotional communities and to the construction of pious subjects in the Būyid period. Al-Dāraquṭnı̄'s fragmentary text reflects how a well-known and highly respected fourth-century ḥadı̄th scholar capitalized on the emotional resonances and sectarian ambiguities made available by the abundance of non-legal and non-prophetic ḥadı̄th generated during the second and third centuries ah.

This paper explores the usages of four concepts – sunna, sīra, āthār, and nasab – mainly in early Ibāḍī epistles, but also in other types of Ibāḍī literature, to examine how early Ibāḍīs understood the legacy of the Prophet Muḥammad, and their relation to that legacy. It argues that before the sixth/twelfth century a notion of communal pedigree occupied pride of place in early Ibāḍī conceptualizations of legality and legitimacy. Thus, Ibāḍī sunna was “communal sunna”. The accumulated weight of Ibāḍī tradition – what is known as āthār in Ibāḍī literature – operated authoritatively as a counterpart to sunna; and the Ibāḍī siyar tradition did not focus on the Prophet exclusively, but rather described the scholarly community as an imagined whole. Moreover, Ibāḍīs explicitly articulated their communal pedigree in “teacher lines” (called nasab al-dīn or nasab al-islām) in Omani literature, and through the structure of their ṭabaqāt/siyar works in North Africa. Appreciating the importance of this communal pedigree, and the nexus of concepts through which it was articulated, helps us to understand the relative lack of emphasis placed on collecting and documenting ḥadīth (Ibāḍīs employ ḥadīth, but they did not use isnāds, nor did they appear to have a ḥadīth collection until the sixth/twelfth century), as well as the general absence of Prophetic biography among them (which also does not appear until the sixth/twelfth century).

How did students at the Imperial University (taixue 太學) in the late Northern Song comment on politics in response to political crises caused by the Jurchen invasion and what enabled them to do so? Through a comparison of 14 memorials submitted by university students and personnel to Emperor Qinzong, this paper examines the ways in which students submitted their petitions, the responsiveness of the court towards their appeals, students’ political sensitivities as well as the channels by which they accessed political information. A close examination of the memorials reveals that students were highly responsive to the rapidly changing political circumstances. Such responsiveness, I would argue, owes much to the presence of different communication channels that facilitated the circulation of political information within literati circles.

The Rgyalrong languages are a group of unwritten non-Tibetic languages spoken in north-western Sichuan Province, China. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the Brag-bar (a dialect of Situ Rgyalrong) kinship terminology at the synchronic level, and then by using both internal reconstruction and comparative method, we attempt to explain the directionality of both formal and semantic changes in the Brag-bar terminology. Thus we demonstrate that the present kinship system of Brag-bar (Situ) originates from a system with Omaha skewing.