Kalīlah wa Dimnah, a compendium of individual tales andshort stories, is a very well-known Middle Eastern literary work. Althoughit can not match the popularity of the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, it is nevertheless sufficiently well known to have attracted scholarly interest for decades. As a result, a considerable volume of scholarly writing has been produced regarding its origin and importance.

This article focuses on the origin of one story in the work, the trial of Dimnah. Since the Indian original is missing, accepted wisdom attributes the writing of this story to its first Arabic translator, Ibnal-Muqaffac. Although I do not challenge this view, I argue that there could be an Urtext in Middle Persian which was later rewritten by the famous translator. In what follows, this article provides evidence for this hypothesis from what at first glance might be considered a surprising perspective – Sasanian legal history.

In this paper I examine British policy towards the Yuan Shikai government in China between 1912 and 1914 through a consideration of the role of Britain's ‘men on the spot’ in China (i.e. British diplomats and bankers resident there). In doing so, I synthesize two bodies of literature that rarely interact: British imperial history and work by China historians. Three main elements shaped British policy in China: first, British policy-makers were determined to support Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power in China; second, in the making of its China policy, the Foreign Office relied heavily on Britain's men on the spot; and, finally, these men were anxious about the vulnerability of the Yuan Shikai government and were therefore manipulated to a certain extent by Chinese politicians. I suggest that British policy-makers were reacting to, rather than controlling, Chinese politics and that in this period collaboration with British imperialism was a rational choice for the Yuan Shikai government.

The recent unearthing of this thirteenth century collection of notespertaining to the political history of the early Ilkhanate has thrown somelight on events and attitudes of that time. Though the manuscript wasactually penned by Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī of the Rasadkhana in Maragha, it isnot certain that he was the author of the work. Rather than comprising onecontinuous narrative of events, the manuscript is a collection of notes andobservations, occasionally detailed but other times very sketchy. Howeverstamped with the seal of the Raba’ al-Rashidi there isevidence that this text was used selectively as a source for Rashīd al-Din's Jama’-ye Tavarikh. What is particularly interesting isthat some of the events that are quoted in Rashid al-Dīn's chronicles areonly partially reported and it is obvious that for whatever reasons parts of“Shīrāzī's” accounts are omitted in the re-telling.

Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline emerging from Hellenism, had anambiguous and disputed role in the theology and apologetics of Islam andcontinues to be contentious. In this article, I examine the arguments overthe legitimacy of philosophy between the philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā(d. c. 1635), dominant in the present Shiʿi seminary inIran, and its detractors in the maktab-i tafkīk who insistthat knowledge of reality and the faith only derives from the teachings ofthe Shiʿi Imams and cannot be contaminated with Aristotelianism. After anintroduction to this fideist school of separating religious and ‘foreign’sciences, three questions are analysed. What is philosophy? How do we knowGod? How can we demonstrate the Qurʾanic doctrine of the resurrection ofbodies? What emerges is a more radical challenge to uṣūlīrationalism than that posed previously from the Akhbāriyyaand their insistence upon a ḥadīth-based jurisprudence.