To the limited materials available for the study of the early Muslim tradition of renunciant piety (zuhd) may now be added the papyrus P.Vindob. AP 1854a–b of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, which is edited, translated, and annotated in this article. Its two incomplete and damaged leaves contain four texts that constitute a small anthology of meditations on the imminence of death and judgment: psalms 7–13 of the Islamic ‘Psalms of David’ (Zabūr Dāwūd); a collection of narratives surrounding the death of the Prophet Muḥammad; a collection of material about grief over the deaths of the Prophet and Fāṭima and over the slaughter of al-Ḥusayn's party at Karbala; and a dialogue between God and the prophet David about the rewards of the afterlife. The papyrus confirms that the long Muslim tradition of rewriting the ‘Psalms of David’ originated in early renunciant circles. It also illustrates the process whereby a ninth-century preacher could compile a notebook of sermon material from a wide range of sources, including poetry, hadith, and an apocryphal scripture. It also shows how much the still-underdeveloped study of early Islamic piety stands to benefit from the even less-studied resource of Arabic literary papyri.

This article traces how the Yemeni-origin Sufi order of Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its ritual litany of al-Ḥaddād, with chants and prayers for the Prophet and his descendants especially from Hadramawt, became part of everyday Muslim devotional practices in Malabar through immigrant networks of Hadrami Sayyids. Competing, sometimes rivalling, and appropriating other Sufi religiosities, the Alawi order meaningfully involved within the theo-legal Sufi discourses that have been remoulding the Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean. By focusing on two notable early immigrant Sayyids in Malabar, this article argues that the successful placement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual was a complex socio-religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.

Japan's Kobe City Museum holds a unique yet overlooked xylographic print of an early seventeenth-century composition that centres on a Chinese-language world map, mounted as a scroll. At first glance, the scroll seems to contain a copy of a well-known composition attributed to the Jesuit Giulio Aleni that is extant at two Italian libraries. It is known in the literature as Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, after the title of only one of three constitutive parts. Detailed comparison shows that the hitherto unstudied Kobe sheet is significantly older. This observation initiates a discussion of the contents and materiality of the Kobe sheet in three steps. First, a reconstruction of intertextual connections to late Ming books based on the introductory text illustrates the function of the sheet map. Second, the origins of the maps proper are investigated, which, unlike the introductory text, can be traced back to a collaborative book project. In a last step, the afterlife of these map sheets is discussed, further illuminating the genealogy of maps that facilitated the production of the Kobe sheet. Throughout, this article highlights the local co-creation of map artefacts and the necessity to study maps in context, beyond the analysis of their cartographic contents.

Evidence shows that tenth- and eleventh-century Kitan (Liao) emperors used pseudo-kinship to cement diplomatic relations with foreign powers as well as for internal affairs. Similarities between this practice and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Mongol anda (sworn friendship) were previously highlighted by Wang Guowei but have yet to be the focus of further study. Kitan emperors used pseudo-kinship as a preferred political tool to establish alliances and reinforce their position in both external and domestic policies. A comparison of Kitan and Mongol traditions also shows a high degree of similarity. However, although they share concepts of sworn friendship and common oath rituals, the establishment of pseudo-kinship occurred in different contexts and often for different purposes. This article attempts to show that Kitan rulers successfully continued the pseudo-kinship diplomacy that existed since the Tang between the hegemons of the steppe and the Central Plain. They achieved this by making regular use of pseudo-kinship diplomacy, in addition to seeking ways to make the practice more acceptable to the Chinese court. These adaptations included a progressive estrangement of diplomatic pseudo-kinship from its original form, casting away oath rituals and adopting a new system of kinship terms.

This article analyses the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid- to late fourteenth century (1330s to 1390s) across Eurasia, looking at three facets of the Crisis: environmental—focusing on climate change; epidemiological—exploring the Black Death's impact on the fall of the Chinggisids; and political—mainly the dilution of the Chinggisid charisma due to the halt of expansion. We argue that the main facet of the Crisis was political, and that it derived from the nomadic culture of the Mongols. This was the same political culture that enabled them to establish their huge empire. However, an integral part of this political culture was the need to secure the support of the nomadic elites who were also the backbone of the Mongol army. This proved to be much harder in a reality of excessive natural disasters on the one hand and the erosion of the Chinggisid charisma due to the renunciation of the ideal of world conquest on the other. The result was a growing number of elite groups who contested for power while nominally retaining the framework of the Chinggisid principle, among whom the imperial sons-in-law played a significant part, as well as the shrink and fragmentation of the Chinggisid polities that survived the Crisis.

Regular remarks of early modern Pashtun authors about the language of their literary works and their ethnicity may be read as an attempt to confirm a distinct place for Pashto writings in the Persophone cultural space and also as an echo of the then-ongoing discourse on Pashtun identity. This article examines the verses of Ashraf Khān Khaṫak (d. 1694) and Kāẓim Khān Khaṫak (d. 1780), who sporadically pondered on artistry and ethnicity as intertwined issues within the framework of the classical genre of self-praise (fakhriyya) and left critical essays on Pashto poetry in the forms of qaṣīda and masnawī. By drawing on Persian poetic traditions, these authors contributed much to the emerging literary criticism in Pashto by sophisticating the discussion of poetic art in their native language. While Ashraf elaborated on the idea of poetry as ‘licit magic’, Kāẓim tried to explain the advantages of the ‘new manner’, which is now commonly known as the ‘Indian style’, for the intellectual progress of both Pashtun litterateurs and their readers. The available details from the poets’ biographies and their occasional statements also indicate that the declarative ethnic self-identification of Pashtun men of letters was intrinsically linked to tribalist ideologies.

This study investigates the importance of interregional mobility along the Eastern Silk Roads during the Mongol period, highlighting the interconnectedness of postal and pilgrim networks in eastern Central Asia, with a particular focus on mid-fourteenth-century changes in the multifaceted dynamics of overland mobility under Mongol rule. By referencing an extensive corpus of Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian administrative texts, as well as pilgrim inscriptions, the research provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the Mongol administration and the postal system within it, and how they were connected with pilgrim activities. The article uncovers valuable insights into how mobility patterns changed over time. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of the geographical aspects of these networks reveals enduring links between the Eastern Tianshan Region and the Gansu Corridor, whilst also underlining the expansion of pilgrim networks during the Mongol period. The research also explores the societal implications of these mobility networks, highlighting the importance of religious affiliation and social status in overland mobility. This comprehensive analysis illuminates the Eastern Silk Roads and presents a unique perspective on the interplay of political, religious, and socio-economic factors that shaped the history of the region during Mongol rule.

The fragmentation of the Ilkhanate (1258–1335) midway through the fourteenth century coincided with the publication of several verse histories that were based upon the Blessed History (Tārīkh-i Mubārak) of Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (d. 1318). Seen by many as lacking originality, these texts have often been treated as a new form of literary expression rather than a source of information about key episodes in Ilkhanid history. While it may be true that the verse histories are largely reliant on other sources for information about events that occurred before their time, the choice of what to copy and how it was presented reveals a great deal about changing attitudes to power, religion, and class as the Hülegüid Dynasty weakened and new power brokers appeared. This article will analyse how four verse histories—the Shāhnāmah-yi Chingīzī of Shams al-Dīn Kāshānī (1312–1316), the Ẓafarnāmah of Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī (1335), the Shāhanshāhnāmah of Aḥmad Tabrīzī (1337), and the Ghāzānnāmah of Nūrī Azhdarī (1361)—reproduced the biography of the prominent Ilkhanid commander, Amīr Nawrūz (d. 1297), to gauge how changing circumstances influenced their view of the past. It will be shown that, although these stories may not offer much in the way of new information about Nawrūz, they do show how writers attempted to reshape their narratives to reinforce values of piety, justice, and loyalty during the Chinggisid crisis of the fourteenth century.

Asking the simple question of why writers in one language commented on works composed in another opens up a set of questions and problems for thinking through the relationships between languages and literary cultures and their development over time. The archive of Hindi literature—a set of literary vernaculars that came into use at the end of the fourteenth century and were assimilated into the modern standard language of Hindi during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—contains a wealth of commentarial literature, including commentaries in which Hindi writers commented on texts in Sanskrit—the privileged ‘cosmopolitan’ language of literature, science, and scripture. Despite the ubiquity of such commentaries, they have received almost no attention from modern scholars—the result of certain nationalist modes of literary historiography that counterpose Hindi and Sanskrit. This article attempts a preliminary history of commentarial writing in Hindi, outlining the motivations, strategies, and techniques behind different types of commentaries that were composed during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Even this brief survey of commentarial writings reveals not only how writers thought about the relationship between Hindi and Sanskrit—which they understood to be two distinct species or modes of language—but also the techniques and operations through which they created new lexicons and metalanguages in the vernacular of Hindi. These commentaries reflect a type of renaissance that occurred during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in northern India, characterised by new types of interpretive and analytical engagements with ‘classical’ works.

In the mid-fourteenth century, the Jochid ulus went through a phase of extreme political turbulence. Following the death of the last Batuid khan Berdibek (r. 1357–1359), during the next two decades, circa 1360–1380, a high number of power contenders rose at both the central and the local levels of the ulus. This article aims to map and exemplify those attempts as part of the broader theoretical discussion concerning the scope and depth of the khanate's crisis. It does so by combining an overall, bird's-eye perspective on the political history of the ulus by zooming in on the regional history, as well as through the analysis of both written primary and numismatic sources. None of the multiple patterns of reaction to the dying-out of the Batuid lineage clearly contradicted the idea of the khanate's unity and the overarching ‘Chinggisid principle’. At this point in time, the ulus still followed the centrifugal logic of the Chinggisid rule. At the same time, the crisis of the Jochid ulus of the mid-fourteenth century indeed prepared the very ground for the power division between the still-existing branches of the Jochid family and the break-up of the Jochid power domain of the fifteenth century that followed the last unification attempt of the ulus under Toqtamïsh (r. 1380–1406).

This article examines the intertwined history of local divination schools and divination instructors during the Yuan–Ming transition through a microhistory of the Zhu family—a diviner family who, as newcomers to Suzhou, carefully navigated the turbulent dynastic transition. Based on broader prosopographical research of Yuan and Ming divination school instructors, this study draws two main conclusions regarding social and institutional history during this crisis period. First, the Zhu family, representing lesser elites whose status depended on state institutions, survived the Yuan–Ming transition by building local networks, transforming their expertise, and manipulating narratives of their family history. Second, despite the Ming founder's order for the re-establishment of local divination schools, it was the diviner families, seeking to recover from the dynastic transition, who played a key role in restoring the local institution. This study extends our understanding of the scope of the fourteenth-century crisis, its diverse manifestations across social groups, and the manipulation of crisis narratives for various purposes. It also proposes a bottom-up approach to engage with the Yuan–Ming social and institutional continuity and rupture.

This article proposes to examine an obscure episode in the long career of the well-known Welsh Baptist missionary Timothy Richard, who went to China in 1870 and spent most of the next 45 years there. Richard attended the second general Protestant Missionary Conference in Shanghai in 1890 and served on committees, spoke at meetings, and presented a paper. The information available, though scanty, confirms key components of his approach to mission at this time: his goal was to achieve Chinese ‘salvation’ by promoting the principles and practices of what might be broadly termed ‘Christian civilisation’; his means of propagation was the written word; his preferred point of entry was contact with members of China's ‘ruling’ or ‘governing’ classes. In response to his call for action against anti-Christian, anti-Church propaganda, the conference appointed a permanent committee, with Richard as chair, to present an address on the ‘missionary question’ to the Qing government. It was this project that took him to Beijing in 1895, where he met with court officials and members of the educated elite, and established connections that involved him, rather haphazardly, in court politics in 1898. The sequence of events sheds light on an intriguing aspect of Sino–foreign relations during the late Qing period.

The current scholarship on Ku Hung-Ming (1857–1928) as a translator and a historical figure has been constrained by identity politics and has viewed his translations and writings as a passive response to the challenge of the Western powers from a Chinese nationalist, or as a process of Ku's identity-building. This article goes beyond these constraints and recognises Ku as an active critic of Western modernity. By drawing on narrative theory, it investigates Ku's three broad choices regarding his translated Confucian classics—translation directionality, the invocation of Goethe, and the use of language mixing on the title pages and/or in the front matter—to demonstrate that Ku's translation agenda was to critique Western modernity. This article constitutes a paradigm shift in the research on Ku's translation of Confucian classics, and challenges what I call the ‘eccentricity thesis’ in Ku Hung-Ming studies to raise awareness of Ku as a critic of modernity.