When Kipling published that aptly-named poem ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ in 1886 his use of the term ‘jezail’ was no more literary device, for the tribesmen of the north-western borderlands were then armed with locally made, muzzle-loading, smooth-bore muskets. A decade later a few European breech-loading rifles began to appear, and by 1907 the military intelligence department estimated that over a quarter of those tribesmen had acquired a modern weapon. It was the Government of India's wish to halt that flow of arms which led to a British naval blockade of the south-eastern coast of Persia from 1909, and the landing of troops in Makrāan during 1910 and 1911.

The famous British orientalist E. G. Browne, a physician by training, was interested in Turkish language and literataure long before he became Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that he wrote most of the works in the field of Persian studies, which were to bring him recognition as an outstanding Iranologist. But Browne's sense of affinity with the Turks endured from the time of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877–78, when he was only 16, until the end of his life in 1926. In 1914 he wrote in his introduction to The press and poetry of modern Persia: ‘Curiously enough it was the Ottoman Turks, a people far less original and talented than either the Persians or the Arabs, who so far as the Near East is concerned, introduced the hitherto unknown ideas of ‘the Fatherland’ (watan), ‘the nation’ or ‘people’ (millat) and ‘liberty’ (hurriyyat) and who succeeded in giving to these old words this new and potent significance.’

Outstanding amongst the scholastic compendia of jurisprudence produced in the fifth/eleventh century are the Muhadhdhab of the Shāfi 'ī scholar Abū Ishāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 476) and the Mabsūt of the Ḥanafī scholar Shams al-Dīn al-Sarakhsī (d. 483). These works encoded three centuries of juristic speculation while confirming and promoting the distinctive patterns of their respective law schools. Both scholars, Sarakhsī in Qarakhanid Trasoxania, and shīrāzī in Saljūq Baghdad, were involved in the politics of their day, but produced no political theory seeparate from their large-scale works of furū' which followed the traditional pattern of furū' literature, established as early as Mālik. The holistic approach to divine law was the conformity to type of Sarakhsī's and shīrāzī's works helped to ensure them the classical status they acquired in the developing law-schools, and in the curricula of madrasas. The Kitāb al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya of Māwardī (d.450)was in contrast, to a great extent, innovatory in subject matter and in structure, if not in juristic methodology. The difference between writers like Sarakhsī, on the one hand, and Māwardī, on the other, is not however simply formal: it includes a nicely distinguished approach to political power. The nature of this distinction might be demonstrated under a number of discrete headings selected from furū' literature. This essay is concerned with Friday Prayer (FP), a ritual generally recognized as having in some degree a political aspect.

The economic state of Ṣafavid Persia has not been extensively studied and much of that which is known is deived from European sources, British, Dutch, and Russian in particular and to a lesser extent from the French, Venetian, Turkish, and Portuguese archives. There is no doubt that among the buildings of the Court at Iṣfahān there were one or more registries (daftarkhāna) in which archives were kept and documentation recorded on a systematic basis. There is internal evidence from royal correspondence to earlier exchanges of letters and in some cases later decrees are modelled on earlier ones. Unfortunately, economic information from Persian sources has scarcley survived and it has to be presumed from circumstantial evidence that following the occupation of Iṣfahān by the Afghans the archives were destroyed or burnt.

The rise and development of Persian poetry in Transoxiana and Khurāsān coincided with the growth in influence of the Turkish element in the Sãmãnid state. Although Turks had alredy been living in these regions at the time of the Arab conquest, it was under the Sāmānids especially that emerged into political and military prominence, having risen form the status of slaves to the highest ranks of power. In the fragmentary survivals of the Persian poetry of this period we not only find mention of Turks but even the occasional word of Turkish origin:

‘This cloud is like a crazed Turk, shooting arrows; the lightning his shafts, and the rainbow his bow.’

The Iranian economy underwent impressive growth in the value and volume of foreign trade during the nineteenth century. The combined figures for imports and exports show the widening of commercial links and economic interrelations between Iran and the rest of the world, particularly Europe. Between 1800 and 1914 total visible trade at current prices rose from £2.5million to £20 million. The implication of these figures is that in real terms visible trade increased about 12 times. The greater portion of this increase occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Sīstān (Sijistān or Sāgistān) came within the scope of British Indian frontier defence during the Napoleonic era. Lord Minto sent out missions to the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Persia in order to acquire reliable information about the borderlands. Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger in 1810 explored the route westward into Persia from Baluchistan. Christie separated from the others at Nushki and travelled to Herat via Sīstān before joining Pottinger in Iṣfahān. According to Christie: Seistan is a very small province on the banks of the Helmind, comprising not more than five hundred square miles, bounded on the north and northeast by Khorasan, on the west by Persia, and on the south and south-east it is separated from Mukran by an uninhabited desert.

With few surviving chronicles and the loss of almost all the state archives, historians of the later Ṣafavid period have to rely to a disproportionate degree on the accounts of European travellers. Fortunately some of these, such as Chardin, Tavernier and Olearius, have left pre-eminent examples of the genre, but even so, few attempts have been made to explore their preceonceptions, prejudices or the extent of their understanding of Persian society. Almost all travelled for a well-defined purpose, as members of diplomatic missions, military advisers, missionaries or merchants, and their attitudes and the kind of information they recorded naturally were determined by these preoccupations. They did not necessarily ask the kind of questions that interest historians today and rarely reached levels of Persian cultural and intellectual life beyond the Court and provincial officialdom.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are outstanding chapters even in such an eventful history as that of Persia. The former witnessed the Mongol invasion and occupation; the latter ended amidst the campaigns to Timur. Although the Mongol onslaught caused much destruction, the unexpected literary outburst of the period remains a monument to the indestructible spirit of man. It is ironic that an age of terror and devastation should bring in its wake an unprecedented flowering of culture, as though the phoenix rises renewed from the ashes. For this very period produced the three greatest Persian poets, namely, Rūmī, Sa‘dī and Ḥāfiṣ, and the age in which they lived is by common consent regarded as the Golden Age of Persian poetry. In prose too, although to a lesser extent, fine work was produced, most notably of course, Sa‘dī's Gulistān.

With the accession of Tegüder, alias Ahmad, on the death of his brother Abaqa in 681/1282, the Īlkhānate was for the first time ruled by a Muslim. Consequently the possibility appeared of the establishment of peaceful relations with the rival Mamlūk sultanate under al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (regn. 678–89/1279–90). Two successive embassies were in fact sent to the sultan during Ahmad's short reign, and accounts of these as seen in Mamlūk court circles are extant in the writings of two contemporaries. The first appears in the largely unpublished biography of Qalāwūn, al-Fadl al-ma'thūr min sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by Shāf‚’ b. ‘Alī (649–730/1252–1330), and the second in the published but incomplete biography, Tashrīf al-ayyām wa'l-‘usūr fi sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by the maternal uncle of Shāfi'b. ‘Alī, Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir (620–92/1223–92). Both writers served in the chancery of the sultan in Cairo.

Shī'ī scholars from Jabal 'Āmil, the hill-country which lies inland from Ṣaydā and Ṣūr in southern Lebanon, claim that theirs is the oldest of all Shī'ī communities. They attribute its foundation to Abū Dharr, a Companion of the Prophet and one of the first supporters of the claims of 'Alī to be his successor. He is said to have gone from Madīna to Damascus, and to have been exiled from there to the country districts of Bilād al-Shām, or Syria in the broader geographical sense. There is a mosque associated with his name in the village of Mays al-Jabal.

From the earliest times, the political tradition of Islam, on the one hand as formulated in Islamic theology and law, on the other hand as expressed in the accepted versions of early Islamic history, contains two distinct and in some measure even contradictory principles concerning the problems of government and obedience, of which one might be described as authoritarian and quietist, the other as radical and activist. The exponents of both these principles point to the authority of the Qur'ān and tradition, and to the example of the Prophet himself. Both principles are indeed exemplified in the career and teachings of the Prophet and in the history of the early caliphate, which constitute the shared memorv and common heritage of Muslims everywhere. These two traditions may be examined separately.

Iran was preeminently and agricultural country until recent times. Growth of oil production, exports and revenues during the course of the twentieth century led increasingly to it playing an expanded but rather geographically and economically restricted role in the structures of both employment and national income. As late as the 1960s, more than half of all Iranians in gainful employment were to be found in agriculture or related activities and most Iranians were essentially rural dwellers. Only with the advent of land reform and other upheavals in the countryside from 1961 was there a marked change in the situation. Whatever its other merits, land reform overthrew a form of equilibrium in rural areas that had previously fostered conservatism, isolation and immobility. Among the changes brought in the train of reforms enforced by the central authorities beginning in the early 1960s were displacement of population at an accelerating rate. Rural People left agricultural employment and, as soon as opportunity presented itself, moved from the villages to the towns.

One of the odder features of the Persian sources on the history of the Mongol period is the vagueness and comparative rarity of references to the ‘Great Yāsā of Chingiz khān’. This struck me with renewed force after reading Professor David Ayalon‚s articles on the Yāsā in Studia Islamica. My suspicions about the whole matter having thus been aroused, it seemed to me that it might be an interesting exercise to look again at the origin and nature of the Yāsā before trying to estimate how Mongol law worked in the Ilkhānate. And so, as I hope to show in this in this paper, it proved.

In cataloguing the British Museum's collection of early Islamic glass stamps the writer was faced with a small disk with a brief inscription, a type of which two other specimens had already been published. The weights of these pieces, which lack any explicit indication of their purpose, showed that they belonged to the category of dīnār weights. The inscription that did exist had been variously interpreted, but not as containing a personal name. For reasons that are given below, the writer came to the conclusion that the word ‘abdallāh in the legend was a name, that it could only refer to the son of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān and that the weights were produced in Egypt in ‘Abdallāh's name during the period when he was Governor there (A.H. 86–90/A.D. 705–9). ‘Abdallāh's dīnārnar weights thus became the earliest known coin weights in the great corpus of glass metrological stamps issued in Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid Egypt, preceding those of the next Governor, Qurra b. Sharīk, which had long maintained their place at the beginning of the coin weight series. The British Museum's piece could therefore be given pride of place in the catalogue as No. 1.

The great famine of 1870–71 was arguably the most tragic event in the modern economic and social history of Persia. Over wide areas of the country almost no rain fell during the winter of 1869/70, and in the following year only the western and southern provinces were blessed with any precipitation. Many areas did not have a single drop of rain during that two-year period. Khurāsān, Isfahān, Yazd and Fārs were particularly hard hit by the drought. In many areas dry-farming crops were wiped out, and harvests of irrigated crops were also very poor as a result of the severe depletion of surface and sub-surface water. Even the Zāyandeh-rūd, which normally contained a large volume of water, dried up.

A superficial consideration of the history of Arabic literature impresses one by the remarkable longevity of literary forms: a qaṣīda written by the pre-Islamic poet Imru'l-Qays and many of those written by Aḥmad Shawqī who died in 1932 are eminently recognizable members of the same species. The system of prosody as codified by Khalīl b. Ahmad (d. A.D. 791) was still very much in force, and the thematic divisions into nasīb, wasf, and madīḥ or hijā' still had much in common. Similarly the maqāma form with its or ornate rhyming prose and limited range of stock characters was still being produced in Arabic at the turn of this century, and the links with the works of al-Hamadhānī (d. A.D. 1008) and al-Harīrī (d. A.D. 1122) are plain to behold and to hear. As with much world literature which is the product of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ societies (for want of better terms), style is all. In thematic terms there is an implicit contract of understanding between the writer and the small, rarefied, élitist public. They know what to expect and the writer or performer delivers. The language, both in its form and its content, is a vehicle through which the relationships between writer or performer, and public or audience, are expressed.

The role of metaphor in the generation of descriptive terms is a commonplace of lexicography. Agency is usually identified as analogy, and the transfer itself analysed in terms of real or imagined similarity, e.g. ‘goth’ = barbaric, ‘gypsy’ = migrant, ‘vandal’ = destructive. Strictly defined, these exemplify metonymy, a species of metaphor found particularly in toponyms and gentilics. Development of such epithets as'‘arab’, ‘deutsch’ and ‘sūdān’ may be seen as a complementary process, wherein the common attribute is given a specific referent. Thought it is no longer, since Jakobson, deemed quite proper to define metonymy as metaphor, a symbolic and often arbitrary element in the transfer might be thought to justify that interpretation, as for instance in the gentilic Iberian or the appellative Qadariyya. While ultimately of less significance than context, etymology is seldom neglected in such investigations, may, indeed, become a dominant feature, as in the perennial discussion of ḫāpirū: 'ibrī = ‘hebrew’. It is my intention in the following lines to examine the incidence and possible origins of an appellative well known from early Arabic historiography.