After the Prophet Muhammad, the most contested figure in Islamic history would be his son-in-law, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. ʿAlī’s political rivals staunchly denounced him, his family and his partisans as impious criminals in his own lifetime and after his death. Shortly after his assassination, the Umayyads succeeded in obtaining the reins of the caliphate and establishing a dynasty that lasted close to a century. Medieval sources indicate that rhetoric and propaganda hostile to ‘Alī permeated public discourse under the Umayyads. Nonetheless, through the efforts of his admirers, ʿAlī became a respected authority in both Sunnī and Shīʿī Islam within a few centuries of his death. His nearly universal portrayal in Muslim literature as a pious authority rather obscures a centuries-long process of contestation and rehabilitation. This study considers the methods that ḥadīth transmitters and scholars employed to reconcile expectations regarding ʿAlī’s character and image in Sunnism with the vast and heterogeneous body of accounts about him. Sunnī scholars made use of their editorial privilege by transmitting selected versions of reports and omitting controversial material.

The question of the origin of music and its powers has always fascinated philosophers and scientists. Here we present a close reading of the view offered by the Persian Muslim philosopher and scientist Ibn Sīnā, also known as Avicenna (980–1037). We draw a parallel between Ibn Sīnā’s account of the senses and mental capacities and his hierarchical, quasi-evolutionary view of the perception of sound in its various communicative roles. We show how Ibn Sīnā positions music at the top of the organisation of sound while drawing a connecting line between the sensory and cognitive, the natural and conventional, and the biological and aesthetic. Although mostly drawing on ideas previously expounded by Aristotle and al-Fārābī, he goes way beyond his predecessors in positioning music within the systems of communication and highlights music's special ability to create a flux of joy and sadness, tension and relaxation, based on the ephemeral character of sound that serves as a connecting thread through all levels of its communicative roles.

Writing in Isfahan in 729/1328-9, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad b. Abī l-Riżā ʿAlavī Āvī produced a translation into Persian of the eleventh-century Arabic Risālat Maḥāsin Iṣfahān (‘Epistle on the Merits of Isfahan’) of Mufaḍḍal b. Saʿd b. al-Ḥusayn al-Māfarrukhī. This article explores the context for and purposes of Āvī’s translation-adaptation with particular reference to the extensive system of networks active in western Iran during the reign of the Ilkhan Abū Saʿīd (r. 716-36/1316-35). It is proposed that Āvī intended his translation to provide a means of entry into the urban élites and an affiliation with the administrative circles associated with the vizier Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 736/1336), a son of Rashīd al-Dīn Fażl Allāh, who occupied a position at the apex of this system of networks.

The aim of the present article is to describe the morphosyntactic properties of Iranian Coastal Balochi as spoken by the Afro-Balochi community. The Afro-Baloch have completely switched to Balochi and there are no traces of African languages in their speech. In comparison with other Balochi dialects of Iran on the one hand and Coastal Balochi dialects of Pakistan on the other, Coastal Balochi as spoken in Iran shows archaic characteristics, particularly in its case system, in the demonstrative pronouns and in the alignment features. This particularly applies to the speech of the Afro-Baloch, who due to persisting social segregation have limited access to education and media.

Khargi is spoken on the island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf. A member of the Southwest branch of the Iranian languages, Khargi is related to the languages spoken in the province of Fārs and along the coastal line down to the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting extensive maritime contact, yet does not lend itself to any of the known subgroups of the family. As Khargi remains largely obscure, this article offers a morphosyntax and lexical analysis based on published texts and those collected by the author. It investigates the linguistic position of Khargi based on comparative-historical phonology as well as areal features, with a look at cross-linguistic influence in the situation of language contact. By contrasting linguistic findings with details of history and economy, an attempt is made to date the original and later human settlements on the island.1

Various descriptions of the two Mughal capitals, Agra and Delhi, mention the gates of both royal forts as decorated with the statues of two warriors mounted on elephants. The list of those who had described these sculptures and reconstructed their history includes late-medieval Indian writers, European travellers to the Mughal empire, scholars from the nineteenth century onwards, authors of tourist guides; there is a popular oral narrative on them as well. The most widely spread version attributes the statues to the Rajput warriors who defended Chittor against the Mughal invasion and who were immortalised by the emperor Akbar in a sign of his recognition of their valour. This article is an attempt to ‘investigate’ the controversial story of a Mughal ruler glorifying his sworn enemies and to analyse historical circumstances that could be a background for such a narrative.

In premodern monsoon Asia, the legal worlds of major and minor traditions formed a cosmopolis of laws which expanded chronologically and geographically. Without necessarily replacing one another, they all coexisted in a larger domain with fluctuating influences over time and place. In this legal cosmopolis, each tradition had its own aggregation of diverse juridical, linguistic and contextual variants. In South and Southeast Asia, Islam has accordingly formed its own cosmopolis of law by incorporating a network of different juridical texts, institutions, jurists and scholars and by the meaningful use of these variants through shared vocabularies and languages. Focusing on the Shāfiʿī School of Islamic law and its major proponents in Malay and Arabic textual productions, this article argues that the intentional choice of a lingua franca contributed to the wider reception and longer sustainability of this particular legal school. The Arabic and Malay microcosmoi thus strengthened the larger cosmopolis of Islamic law through transregional and translinguistic exchanges across legal, cultural and continental borders.

The fort of Ahmadnagar is important in the Sultanate history of the Deccan. There is no published epigraphic evidence regarding its construction. This notice concerns an inscription that has hitherto gone unnoticed, and which mentions the rebuilding of the fort in stone.

Most information concerning relations between Spain and China in the context of the early colonial Philippines comes from Spanish sources. In this paper we present a contribution from the Chinese. Soon after the Spaniards started settling Manila, the number of Chinese there started increasing rapidly. Relations between Chinese and Spanish were always fraught and the only protectors the Chinese had were the Dominican priests who ministered to them. In desperation they wrote a letter in Chinese to King Philip II, which was “translated” into Spanish. We do not know of any other letter document conceived in Chinese being sent to a king in this period. We present the powerful letter in English translation.