Acre is situated on the northern Mediterranean coast ofIsrael, about 13 km to the north of Haifa. Itshistory since the twentieth century bce hasbeen well-documented. Until the third centurybce it stood on a mound called Telal-Fukhar. From the Hellenistic period the citydeveloped on the plain to the west of this mound.Acre experienced two important phases during itslong existence. The first was during the Hellenisticera, when it occupied the mound, the plain, and therocky peninsula to the south of the western sectorof the plain. The second was during the Crusaderperiod, when it occupied an even larger area.Between these two periods, the city declined,although it was still repeatedly referred to inhistorical sources.

Following the establishment of the Republic of Turkeyin 1923 and the consolidation of the Kemalist regimein 1926, the President of the new republic, MustafaKemal Atatürk launched a reform process which aimedat changing Turkey's laws, administration, cultureand, most significantly, its image. One facet ofthis process of transformation was the languagereform that commenced with romanisation of theTurkish script in late 1928 and reached its zenithlater on in the 1930s. Between 1932 and 1934, theTürk Dil Kurumu – the TurkishLanguage Institute, a radical reformist institutionfounded by Atatürk in 1932 – banished thousands ofArabic and Persian words from spoken and writtenTurkish and fabricated new, ‘authentically’ Turkish,words to replace them. The radical-reformist zealsubsided in 1935 as a result of the linguistic chaosof the previous years and came to a halt in 1936with the proclamation of the so-called Sun-LanguageTheory. However, so much had changed during thosefew years and has done since, that even secondaryschool and university graduates in contemporaryTurkey are not able to read and understand, forinstance, Atatürk's famous Speechof 1926 from its original, and hence feel the needto consult ‘modernised’ or simplified versions. Inthis respect, the legacy of the language reform inearly republican Turkey remains a matter of bittercontroversy and pits the reformist Kemalists againstan array of Islamists, conservatives and evenliberals. The current debate on what proper Turkishis neatly overlaps with the major fault line thatstill divides Turkish society.

With the exception of a minor mention, which SharafKhān (b.1543) made in theSharafnāma, the first informationabout the most southern group of Kurdish tribes inIranian Kurdistan, the Lek, first became availableto modern readers in Bustānal-Sīyāḥa, a geographical and historicalPersian text by Shīrwānī (1773–1832). These hithertounknown Lek communities, were probably settled innorth-western and northern Luristan, known asLekistan, by order of Shāh ‘Abbās, who wished inthis way to create some support for Ḥusayn Khān, thewālī of Luristan. Many of thecentres of Lekî intellectual life in the lateAfshārīd and early Zand period, which is also ofmuch importance in that the Zand dynasty arose fromit, are located in this geographical area. One hasonly to call to mind the names of such places asAlishtar (Silsila), Kūhdasht, Khāwa, Nūr Ābād,Uthmānwand and Jalālwand in the most southerndistricts of Kirmānshāh, and also the Lek tribes ofeastern Īlām. The very mention of these cities andvillages already sets in motion in one's imaginationthe parade of Twelver Shiites, Ahl-i Haqq heretics,and non-religious oral literary councils whichconstitutes the history of Lekî new era. Butunfortunately little of this is known in the Westand Lekî literature remains one of the neglectedsubjects of literary and linguistic Kurdish studies.This important oral literature and also some writtenmanuscripts are unpublished and untranslated intowestern languages. The subject of this article isthe translation of Zîn-ə Hördemîr,as an example of a genre of Lekî written literaturewhich also provides linguistic data for the Lekîdialect of southern Kurdish.

§1: AVP 2.19.§2.Dṛtiin theVedas and Later2a. AVP 2.19.3:Hoffmann's CorrectionofdṛtyṃTOdhṛtyṃ.2b. The Meaningsofdṛti2c.the Irregular FeminineGender2d.The Shape ofthedṛti.2e.Inflateddṛtisas Floats. Abbreviations andBibliography. Picture of adṛti in use.

There has appeared a new trend in recent scholarship onthe early modern Islamic world that analyzes therole of gender and sexuality in society and culture.Ruby Lal and Rosalind O'Hanlon have investigatedwomen and gender roles in the sixteenth-centuryMughal harem and the broader imperial courtrespectively. Mehmed Kalpaklı, Walter Andrews, andKhaled El-Rouayheb have studied the nature or theimplications of sexual relationship among men inIstanbul as well as the Arab provinces of theOttoman Empire. Kathryn Babayan and AfsanehNajmabadi have read Safavid and Qajar literature andvisual arts through the lens of gender and powerpolitics. Together these scholars have successfullyhighlighted the relevance of this methodologyparticularly in its application to the narrativesources that comprise the bulk of our documentationsfor the period (except for the Ottoman case ofcourse), and it is to subject to such an approach abrief, but crucial, period in early Mughal historyand historiography that the present article nowproceeds.

The publication of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles'sThe History of Java in 1817marked a new sophistication in the recording ofBritish experiences of the island. Providing a depthof analysis and breadth of subject matter, Raffles'spublication was not the fairly simplistic diaristicaccount of adventure and opinion that hadcharacterised many earlier British publications onSoutheast Asia, but a highly detailed, minutelyobserved and handsomely illustrated study.