This article contributes to the established scholarship on Sir William Jones (d.1794) by providing a detailed overview and analysis of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collection that Jones acquired both before arriving in India in 1784, and during his time living in Kolkata. 118 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and 69 Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as nine Chinese manuscripts, were transferred to the Royal Society library by Jones in 1792. These were then transferred to the India Office Library in 1876 and are currently housed in the British Library. As well as an in-depth survey of these manuscripts, this article provides important information on the manuscripts which remained in the Jones's possession after 1792 and which were sold, along with the rest of Lady Jones's (d.1829) library, at auction in 1831 after her death. Within this overview of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collections, there will be a sustained focus on the methods of acquiring manuscripts and Jones's curatorial management of his library.

This article aims to clarify an obscure passage in Plano Carpini's text, and subsequently in C. de Bridia's one, referring to a crushing defeat of Chinggis Khan, which has so far not been identified with certainty. The record of such a defeat is found in identical terms under the pen of Jūzjānī, and it actually appears that this strange narrative follows the pattern of the Mongol myth of origin, which is also common to the myths of the Türks, of the Kimeks and others. Here the argument is made that these accounts written outside the Mongol territory are therefore not only the result of confusion and distortion, contrary to what has long been thought. They testify to the existence of a legend of Chinggis Khan, built in an imperial propaganda effort directed at all the nomadic subjects of the Mongol Empire, and which placed the birth of the empire and the story of the origins contained in the myth on the same symbolic level.

The murder of the Prophet's chief Jewish opponent, Ka‘b b. al-Ashraf, led to grave consequences for the tribe of Banū al-Naḍīr and for the Jews as a whole. The incident ushered in a series of hostile Muslim-Jewish encounters that reached its climax in the battle of Khaybar. Despite the constructive study undertaken by previous scholars, there still seem to be some contradictory elements and vague accounts that have been either utterly ignored or for which a satisfactory explanation is lacking. In the light of certain striking pieces of evidence, scattered in unlikely places in the sīra and tafsīr compendia, the present study sets out to examine critically the extent to which the accounts of Ka‘b's murder can be trusted. It will be argued that what we are faced with is seriously distorted material with logical absurdities and discrepancies that cannot easily be reconciled. Apart from the historical reconstruction, special attention will be devoted to a momentous historiographical point—that our reports have been doctored for political reasons. This helps us adopt a more realistic view of the individuals whose names occurred in the accounts of the event in question.

The term isrāʾ, based on the first verse of sūra 17, is typically rendered as ‘Night Journey’. There is little compelling evidence that this was the original meaning of the Qur'anic text, and medieval lexicographers and exegetes preserved a number of alternative meanings, such as that asrā was a denominal verb meaning ‘to travel through the uplands (al-sarāh)’. Another explanation is that asrā is a denominal verb of the noun sariyya (pl. sarāyā), a military expedition. By drawing on early historiographical descriptions of sarāyā and South Arabian inscriptions, which give evidence that the word sariyya is of Sabaic origin, the Qur'anic meaning of asrā was evidently something like ‘to send on a royal expedition’. Early Islamic Arabic poetic texts also offer extremely compelling evidence that the first Muslims were familiar with some of the key concepts of South Arabian royal authority as they appear in Sabaic inscriptions.

This article presents and analyses two previously unknown sources on Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia (1710–83). While the raja has long been famed in Bengal as a patron of brahmans, scholarship on him has had to contend with a lack of evidence. The two new sources, reports of conversations between Krishnachandra and Europeans, furnish insights into his mind and milieu. They support recent arguments that he used brahmanical patronage to buttress his authority, and deception to deal with the ascendant East India Company. Their greatest contribution, however, is to reveal that the raja sought an active engagement with foreign intellectual traditions. They suggest that eighteenth-century Hindu learning, far from being inherently hidebound or insular, was amenable to outside influences.

This article discusses a Sufi-inspired reformist movement that was set up in Chakrala (Pakistani Punjab) by Maulana Allahyar during the second half of the twentieth century. Attention is paid to the polemical religious context in which this movement arose, in part linked to the proselytising activities of local Shias and Ahmadis. Allahyar's preaching in the town created sectarian divisions within Chakrala's syncretic religious traditions. His reformist ideas also were articulated through a tablighi jamaat (missionary movement), which penetrated the armed forces of Pakistan during the military rule of Ayub Khan. Against this backdrop, the article also discusses the interface between Islam and the army, as this relationship played out in Indian prisoner-of-war camps holding captured Pakistani soldiers in the wake of the 1971 war, and so points to ways in which the mutual performance of mystical practices by Allahyar's Jamaat created a cohesive moral community.