Tughluqabad, situated 18 kilometres south-east of New Delhi, is the oldest surviving sultanate town in India. It was built by Sultan Ghiyāth al-dīn Tughluq between 1320 and 1323, and its well preserved walls, its street layout and the remains of its buildings provide us with the earliest existing example of Indo-Muslim urban planning and its architectural components. The town was designed by Ahmad b. Ayāz, an Anatolian architect and a nobleman of the Tughluq court, who was responsible for the design of many of the early Tughluq buildings1 and who was later raised to the rank of Grand Vizier at the time of Muhammad b. Tughluq (1325–51), but was put to death by Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (1351–88) in the early days of his reign.

A new dispute between Shaykh al-Azhar and the [Chief] Muftī concerning the marriage contract: Shaykh al-Azhar argues that the new contract permits the forbidden and forbids the permitted, that the contract is the creation of the secularists, and that it contains forbidden innovation (bid‘a) and is misleading; the Mufti holds that the contract does not permit the forbidden or forbid the permitted, that it is a result of a permissible independent reasoning (ijtihād mashrū‘), and that some of the articles included in the contract were approved by a few classical jurists.

In her deconstruction of the category ‘ritual’, Bell (1992: 6) suggests that all theoretical discourse on this subject is based on the opposition between thought (beliefs, symbols and myths) and action (the enactment of such cultural templates). Bell further demonstrates that this basic distinction has generated two other homologized structural patterns in ritual theory. In the second pattern, (represented in the works of Durkheim, Tambiah and Turner), there has been an attempt to produce a synthesis of the initial dichotomy. In the third pattern (represented in the studies of Geertz), this opposition and integration has led to another permutation of the original pattern, in which ‘ritual participants act, whereas those observing them think’ (Bell, 1992: 28).

Vast quantities of ceramic shards of the Ayyubid-Mamluk period have been recovered from excavations of major urban sites such as Fusṭāṭ and Ḥamā, as well as from numerous smaller settlements in the Levant. Knowledge of the range of glazed and decorated wares has been supplemented by the publication of complete vessels in museum collections. As a result of archaeological and art historical research some production sites have been identified and broad chronological divisions established within the ceramic repertoire. Less well understood, however, is the social and economic environment within which pottery was produced and utilized. In addition, analysis of the objects themselves reveals little about the value ascribed to ceramics in relation to the other craft media of the period. This paper will attempt to provide further insights into the manufacture, trade and consumption of pottery in the Levant in the Ayyubid-Mamluk period (including some comments concerning the Crusader states in Palestine) by using contemporary Arabic and Western written sources.

The commentary on the Pali Theīgāthā, without which Pischel would ‘hardly have ventured to publish this text at all’ (PTS ed., 1883, 120), has lacked, certainly a complete translation, but more importantly a satisfactory romanized edition. Edward Müller's edition of the commentary (PTS ed., 1893 = Thī-a Ee), based on transcripts of the one Burmese palm-leaf manuscript that had been available to Pischel, contained numerous misreadings and was never revised, although correct readings of the Sinhalese sources have been available since the 1918 Colombo edition, and more readily available, in large measure, since K. R. Norman's annotated translation in Elders' verses, II, 1971.1

Continuing the work of Jacobi and Lüders, Ludwig Alsdorf made a decisive contribution to Middle Indian studies, above all to the elucidation of its prosody and the evolution of its narrative literature. He died some four years after the appearance in 1974 of his original Kleine Schriften, edited by Albrecht Wezler.1 The supplementary volume, also edited by Wezler,2 includes six articles from the period 1974–78, together with a welcome reprinting of the important monograph of 1962 in which he surveyed the distinctly non-vegetarian appreciation of the cow that helped to give rise to the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain literatures of Ahiṃsā.3