The dating of the so-called Oracle of Hystaspes or its Vorlage has for long been a major problem among scholars. This article attempts to articulate some issues present in the Oracle and similar or identical ones known to have been used in Mthridates’ VI Eupator propaganda. This can help not only dating the Oracle itself but also solve dating problems in Persian apocalyptic texts, whose dating may be pushed backwards.

This article contains the original unpublished Syriac text of the Story of the Holy Friday, an anonymous hagiographic composition that promotes an idiosyncratic form of Friday veneration, which demands that Christians refrain from work on that day completely. The text of the Story, published on the basis of manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, syr. 234, is accompanied with an English translation and discussion of its unusual message, possibly related to the early period of Muslim-Christian relations in the Near East.

The Islamic laws pertaining to mustḥāḍa—women who have dysfunctional uterine bleeding (istiḥāḍa)—have been overlooked in the research literature. This article reopens the research discourse on this topic by discussing two related questions: may a mustḥāḍa perform religious obligations and may she have sexual intercourse? The questions are shown to be somewhat related. It is found that jurists conceded the right of a mustḥāḍa to pray but disagreed about why—implying, contrary to previous scholarship, that Islam accommodates different levels of ritual impurity—and that they held divergent views on her having intercourse. By probing and investigating Islamic legal sources, it is shown that research assertions about istiḥāḍa thus far require circumscription and re-examination.

In early quranic Manuscripts the name of the prophet ʾIbrāhīm occurs in two different spellings either ابرهم or ابرهيم . These two spellings are spread haphazardly throughout the Quran. Close examination of the patterns in the manuscript, however, show that the distribution of this spelling is not random or up to the whims of the scribe. The location where one spelling or the other occurs is highly correlated across the early manuscripts. Moreover, the location of one spelling or the other is highly correlated to where the quranic reader Hišām reads the name as ʾIbrāhām or ʾIbrāhīm. This paper argues that this is not because these manuscripts have been written in the reading of Hišām, but rather that Hišām based his reading on the rasm of the quranic text.

This article seeks to reconstruct the prevailing concepts, images and principles that framed sovereign governance in the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the early seventeenth century. Little is known about the subject. To help fill the gap, two contemporaneous advice-to-kings treatises—one Mughal by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī, one Ottoman by Koçi Bey—are analysed in juxtaposition. Such an analysis, never previously undertaken, is motivated and guided by a novel approach. In this approach, a model founded on near-universal conditions and problems is deployed within a regional perspective. The findings which result advance our understanding of the art of governance in the Mughal and Ottoman empires of the time. But they have a larger importance, too. They move us closer to achieving a break with the decline paradigm, whose logic still persists in mainstream interpretations. They also contribute to a more recent, and rapidly developing, interest in a region spanning much of South Asia and the Middle East that was formative for the global genesis of the modern world.

The year 1937 saw the establishment of Congress Ministries in eight of the eleven provinces in which the provincial elections had been held, Bihar being one of them. The resounding victory of the Congress which secured a clear majority in the province of Bihar and the dismal performance of the Muslim League seemed at the time to depict the mood of the people in general. It was taken as a clear rejection of the politics of communalism and separatism and as an expression of faith in the secular credentials of the Indian National Congress. However, less than a decade later, the province was gripped by severe communal tensions and had become one of the most prominent parts of India from where the movement for Pakistan drew support. This article thus explores the nature of the communal violence that occurred in Bihar in 1946 against the backdrop of the ‘escalating’ communal tensions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It seeks to problematise the dichotomy that exists in literature on communal violence between moments of what have been called ‘extraordinary’ violence (such as riots) and the everyday structures of (what Gyanendra Pandey has called) ‘routine violence’. Through its analysis of contemporary material produced by the Muslim League, the Congress Ministry and the provincial British administration to explain the causes of the 1946 riots in Bihar, it argues that it is in the moments of rupture presented by riots that everyday structures of violence are trivialised or normalised through processes of ‘dichotomisation’, ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘denial’.

This article examines how Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762), one of the most prominent scholars of eighteenth-century India whose thought has continued to be influential in many Muslim circles to the present day, conceptualized the interplay of political power and religious authority. Though several of Wali Allah's numerous writings have received considerable scholarly attention, this aspect of his political and religious thought has, oddly, been much neglected. A close reading of Wali Allah's writings reveals him to be keenly interested not just in the immediately relevant issues of the chronic political instability afflicting his age but also in the broader, theoretical, questions of how political power undergirds the moral force of religious norms and institutions. It is his unusually blunt but robust recognition that power is part of what enables a religious tradition to evolve and change that this article explores. That recognition—buried in writings that purport to be about the merits of Islam's first caliphs—has other important implications, too, notably for an understanding of the broad political context in which the sacred law itself undergoes change.

The purpose of this study is to present a historical review of the Bible translation of Baptist missionaries in China before the publication of the Chinese Union Version (CUV) in early twentieth century, especially the significance of the Baptist translations in this period. This study will also discuss the differences in translation approaches and practices of the Baptists from other denominations.

The history of Chinese Bible translation by the Baptists started when English Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman (1768–1837) and his Armenian helper Johannes Lassar (1781–1835?) published their translation of the whole Bible in 1822 in Serampore. In the 1840s, the Protestant missionaries from different countries and missions decided to translate the Bible into classical Chinese with standardised terminologies for the names and terms in the Bible. This version was known as the Delegates’ Version and was the most important project of common Bible before the CUV. However, it uncovered heavy hiccup and disputes in translating, especially the difficulties in translating religious terms into Chinese. Their biggest point of contention was which, Shen or Shangdi, was the suitable translation of the word “God.” Furthermore, the Baptists insisted Shen as well as Jin (which meant “immerse”) for baptism, while the others recommended Xi (which meant “wash”). In the end, the Baptists withdrew from the translation committee and translated several versions in classical Chinese only by themselves between the 1840s and the 1870s. Until the early twentieth century, Baptist missionaries dedicated themselves to translating the Bible into various Chinese dialects.

Although the Baptists had excellent achievements in the history of Bible translation, they had only played an insignificant role in the project of the CUV and shared the consequent of the CUV after its publication. This paper aims to investigate the work of the Baptists in several aspects, including their translation approaches and problems as well as their significance in the history of Chinese Bible translation.

Although the Portuguese established contact with Thailand soon after their conquest of Melaka in 1511, it was thought that Spaniards did not go there until the disastrous expedition of Diego Belloso in 1596. However, in a little-known manuscript from about 1600 there is an account of an inadvertent visit by a small group of Spaniards in 1585, after they had been blown off course trying to return to Manila from Macao. This includes a description of Ayutthaya, presented here, together with an account of the trials and tribulations they endured in getting back to Manila. The Spaniards had gone to Macao with the Jesuit Alonso Sánchez, ostensibly to sort out a mutiny on a galleon bound for Acapulco, but Sánchez also wanted to pursue his agenda of converting China to Christianity and his reports do not mention this extraordinary adventure of some of his companions.