Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities used to be found in various towns and villages throughout north-eastern Iraq, north-western Iran and southern Turkey before the mass exodus of Iraqi Jewry to the state of Israel in 1950–51. In Iraq, the Aramaic speakers were found in an area that may be denned as the land lying above a line drawn on a map across the country through the towns of Musil and Kirkuk. Aramaic was not the first language of all Jews of the area. In the large towns of Musil, Kirkuk, Aqra, as well as Arbel, Arabic was the Jewish vernacular. In some villages the Jews spoke Kurdish as their first language. In Iran, Aramaic-speaking Jewish communities were found as far south as Kerend. The northern limits of the Jewish Aramaic area were formed by communities in the region of lake Van in southern Turkey and those around lake Urmia in north-west Iran (Hopkins, 1993: 62–4).

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.

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.

Immediately after his successful conquest of Muslim Sicily (1060–92), Roger de Hauteville set about dividing the spoils amongst the small band of Norman, French and Italian knights who were his closest followers. This distribution of the land of Sicily and its inhabitants was in part based upon the fiscal documents of the Muslim administration, which were salvaged and adapted to post-conquest circumstances by a small cadre of Greek bureaucrats imported from Calabria. The documents were of two types: lists of tax-payers, known in Arabic as jarā 'id (sg. jarīda; Greek plateia; Latin plated); and descriptions of estate boundaries, known as hudud (sg. hadd; Greek periorismos; Latin divisa). These were the foundations of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily.

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.

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).

From the medieval confrontation between the Muslim world and Christendom to the present day, the moral and social institutions of the respective “ other” have been the subject of close cross-cultural attention. In particular, questions related to sexual morality, including the issue of homosexuality, were, and still are, used as a polemical focus for mutual denigration.

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.’

Scholars working in the field of oral epic all have a particular form of words committed to memory—Milman Parry's celebrated definition of the formula. The definition in fact appears in two slightly differing forms in Parry's writing. In 1928 he wrote, ‘In the diction of bardic poetry, the formula can be defined as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 13). Two years later came the more familiar version: ‘The formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’ (Parry, 1971: 272). The differences between the two forms of the definition are negligible, and Parry made no further attempt to refine or modify it during the five years of life that remained to him. For Albert Lord, too, the definition was clearly adequate as it stood: in ch. iii of The singer of tales he simply quotes it verbatim (Lord, 1960: 30), and proceeds directly to a consideration of the function of formulaic diction.

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 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.

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

Allusions to Indian medicine appear in Chinese literature from the fifth century A.D. onwards. At first through translated Buddhist texts, and then through the incorporation of material by later Chinese authors in the form of medical theories, diagnostic, surgical methods and prescriptions, a substantial element of Indian medical knowledge permeated into Chinese medicine. Ophthalmology held a unique position in these transmissions. It was invariably associated with the famous name of Nāgārjuna, which is connected with almost all kinds of protoscientific activity in early medieval India. This has given rise to a longstanding debate among scholars regarding the origin of this material, as well as the credibility of its attribution to Nāgārjuna.

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

Being engaged in the preparation of an edition of the Old Persian inscriptions of Naqš-i Rustam and Persepolis for the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (CII), the present author was given the privilege of looking through the relevant material collected by Émile Benveniste (1902–76), who had been entrusted by the Council of the CII in August 1954 with the task of preparing the edition of the cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. In this collection there were found photographs of two minor Old Persian texts of King Xerxes I, previously documented only in the form of drawings by Ernst Herzfeld. These photographs are presented for the first time in this short paper.

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.