This article explores the local context of theprominence of Sufism and sanctity in the latemedieval period (1250–1500) through an examinationof the diffusion of the Qādirī spiritual path in thespatial frame of Palestine. The geographical spreadof the major spiritual paths(ṭarīqas) and the emergence oftheir shaykhs as charismatic figures in the courseof the late medieval period has receivedconsiderable attention by historians of Sufism.Although the study of the social historicaldimensions of the universal evolution and itsnuances and variations is in order, patiently askedquestions remain open regarding the establishment ofthe ṭarīqas into locally embeddedassociations around charismatic shaykhs inparticular historical and geographical settings, aswell as the role local leaders of theṭarīqas played in shaping acommunities' life and space.

In Jumādā II 661/April 1263 the Mamlūk sultan al-Ẓāhir Baybars visited Jerusalem and undertook various pious works, including the erection of a public khān for lodging those visiting the Holy City. Unfortunately Baybars's khān has not survived and much speculation has been made regarding its location. The Arabic sources relating to Baybars's deeds provide a good deal of information relating to his khān, which, once combined with western sources and archaeological evidence, allows us to suggest its probable site, its architectural type, and even range of services.

After Aden came under British rule (1839) its Jewishcommunity was reinforced by Jewish immigrants frominland Yemen and also from other Middle Easterncountries. Some of the Adeni Jews, most of themBritish subjects, entered the Indian-Britishcommercial network and expanded it to East Africa,mainly to Ethiopia, founding commercial strongholdsthere. From the late nineteenth century, Jews comingfrom Yemen joined the existing Adenisettlements.

This paper compares the reasons for the emigration toEthiopia of Adeni Jews and Yemeni Jews, and theireconomic and social status under Italian colonialregime (established in Eritrea in the 1880s). Itdiscusses relations between these Jews, which itargues, were determined by the position of eachgroup in the colonial hierarchy, and by thenecessity of sustaining religious-communal life.Thus, in spite of their shared Yemeni origin andattendance at the same communal institutions,ethnicity and religion proved weaker than social andeconomic considerations, and the two groupscultivated a separate identity.

Using university archives and library catalogues as well as letters and diaries belonging to the Schultens, a Dutch family that produced three generations of outstanding Arabists in the 18th Century, this article looks at the circumstances surrounding the purchase of some annotated dictionaries and manuscripts by Leiden University Library.

When historians explain the end of empires, they oftenfollow a ‘decline and fall’ paradigm which owes itsfame to Edward Gibbon's great book on the RomanEmpire. Recent historians of Late Antiquity,however, have tended to doubt its validity. Thisarticle considers the reasons for the end of theMongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies. It examines the division of the empireinto four khanates, the eventual collapse of each ofwhich is then studied. It suggests that the khanateswhich retained more of their original nomadic ethos– the Golden Horde in the Pontic steppes and theChaghatai Khanate in Central Asia – were able tosurvive longer than those – in the Ilkhanate inPersia and the Great Khanate in China and Mongolia –which had their centres in sedentary lands. Itconcludes that in all cases, ‘fall’ was the resultof internal factors, about which there was nothingthat was inevitable, and that there is littleevidence of a long ‘decline’. Hence the ‘decline andfall’ paradigm does not seem to provide an adequateexplanatory framework.

Iraq in the tenth and eleventh centuries witnessed aflowering of Shiite cultural production with lastingeffects on the Islamic sciences such as law, hadith,theology, and Qur'anic commentary. The works ofal-Shaykh al-Mufīd (d. 413/1022), al-Sharīfal-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044), and al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d.460/1067) not only broke significant new ground inShiite intellectual history and defended Shiitedoctrinal positions against opponents, but also setparameters for production in these fields that wouldremain in effect, grosso modo,until modern times. During the same period, Shiiteauthors made substantial contributions to fields notdirectly related to Shiite religious doctrine,playing a crucial role in elaborating and preservingIslamic heritage in general. Al-Masʿūdī's (d.345/956) famous history Murūjal-dhahab and Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī's(d. 356/967) collection of songs, poetry, andassociated lore, Kitāb al-Aghānī,are prominent examples of Shiite authors'contributions to general Arabo-Islamic culturalproduction. Arguably yet more important is theFihrist, composed in Baghdad in377-378 ah/987-988 ce by Ibnal-Nadīm, an Imāmī Shiite bookseller. This work, acomprehensive catalogue of Arabic book titles, iswidely recognised as one of the most importantsources for the history of all learned disciplinesrecorded in Arabic in the course of the first fourIslamic centuries. As a consequence, the presentunderstanding of entire swaths of Islamicintellectual history, including the rise anddevelopment of Muʿtazilī theology and thetranslation of the Greek sciences into Arabic, isheavily indebted to a Shiite author.

The Mughal Empire is paradigmatic in many of its formulations, and it is epitomised in the persons of its first six padshahs or emperors. The Great Mughals, Grao Mogor, Grand Mogul, Großmogul or Groote Mogul, as the padshahs were known in Europe, have been considered as paragons of rulership. In critical appraisals, which were the prevailing view in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were the quintessential Oriental despots, held up as a warning to those rulers in Europe with similar aspirations. One thinks here especially of Francois Bernier's letters of the Mughal court to his French contacts which included Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). In more sympathetic (and more recent) eyes, such as those of the world-traveller, philosopher and enthusiastic inter-culturalist Count Hermann Keyserling, who was in India in 1911, they were “the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind”. Keyserling came to this conclusion because the Mughals “combined in their personalities so many divers talents: they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers”. He felt that such a “superior human synthesis” (grossartige Menscheitsynthese) had not shown itself in any European king. Here I discuss to what extent the emperor Jahangir fulfilled Francis Bacon's ideal of the perfect ruler.

The Mughal emperors of India were remarkably mobile kings, inspiring modern historians to describe their imperial court culture as ‘peripatetic’. While the Mughals were not immune to the impulse to construct massive urban architect, no Mughal city, no matter how splendid, innovative, accessible or enlightened, remained the imperial centre for long. Through generations of Mughal rule in India, the political relevance of Mughal imperial cities continued to be very limited; it was physical mobility which remained at the centre of Mughal imperial court life and, for much of the Mughal period, the imperial court was encapsulated in the physical presence of the king.

The Oeconomy of Human Life purports to be an Englishtranslation of an ancient Indian text found by aChinese scholar in Lhasa. Almost certainly writtenby Robert Dodsley (1704–1764), the book became aneighteenth-century bestseller. This articlediscusses its place in the varied lineage of westernimages of Asia, beginning with Alexander the Great'sencounter with a group of ‘naked philosophers’ inIndia. It argues that the key features of theOeconomy are representative of the Enlightenmentperiod, with at best tenuous links to Tibet, Indiaand China. However, it also belongs to a muchbroader literary tradition with deep roots andunexpected contemporary resonances.

Although practicing Buddhists and historians of Tibetare well aware of the Ra Mo Che Temple in Lhasa,very little about the building and its history hasbeen published. Situated a short distance north-westof the more-famous Ra Sa gTsug Lag Khang or JoKhang, the temple received, according to thedBa' bZhed, the Buddha imagebrought to Tibet in the time of the Tang princessOng Jo. Early in the reign of Khri Srong lDe bTsan,while the king was still in his minority,anti-Buddhist factions led by Zhang Ma Zham Khrom PasKyes circumscribed royal power and murdered thepro-Buddhist minister Zhang sNa Nam Khri Thong rJeThang la ‘Bar. They also arranged for the image atRa Mo Che to be removed from the temple. The planwas to return the Buddha to China, along with thehead priest and his entourage. The statue's greatweight, however, thwarted the scheme. After beingdragged a short distance, the Buddha was lefthalf-buried in the earth. The state of affairs inthose days is indicated by dBa'bZhed which reports that the Lhasavihāra was turned into a workshopwith sheep carcasses hung from the arms of theprincipal holy images and entrails wound round theirnecks! After Buddhism was reinstated, the Ra Mo Chewas returned to worship. Subject to campaigns ofrefurbishment and additions through the centuries,it was the centre of a number of importantdevelopments, notably becoming the seat of the upperTantric college (rGyud sTod) established by rJebTsun Kun dGa' Don Drub in 1474.

This essay examines the growing crisis of authority in the Muslim world of the past two hundred years. It is a crisis set in motion by the challenges of Western domination, intensified by those of globalisation, and exacerbated by Muslim attempts to resist them. It is a crisis which has pervaded all aspects of Muslim life, but one which has been felt particularly in the religious arena. Focussing initially on how authoritative religious knowledge was established and sustained down to c. 1800, the essay goes on to examine how this system broke down. It demonstrates the fragmentation of authority as new methods of interpretation emerge, as lay interpreters come forward to challenge the ʿulama, and as the individual human conscience comes to be given an increasingly important role. Consideration is also given to the growth of primary and higher education, the emergence of new electronic media, and the transnational movements of Muslims. The outcome has been the growth of a ‘spectacularly wild growth of interpretation’. It remains an open question as to whether this development is a cause for despair or a source of hope.

By correlating literary evidence, avian ethology and neurophysiology I will try to demonstrate why Vālmīki chose a pair of Sārus Cranes, and not any other avian species, to epitomise grief and sorrow in the Rāmāyaṇa. This choice illustrates the importance of personal experience of the living reality (behaviour of Sārus Cranes); but the grief, śoka, as experienced by Vālmīki, became in later critical literature, the rasa of karuṇa, the aesthetic appreciation of grief, as suggested by Ānandavardhana and explained by Abhinavagupta. By emphasising the central importance of affective states (sthāyibhāvas) in life as well as in the arts (rasas) Vālmīki, Abhinavagupta and Ānandavardhana appear to have had a perception of the human condition that is consistent with recent developments in affective neuroscience; and thus it is the pitch and the tonal quality of the cries of grief that convey the depth and universality (sādhāraṇatva) of the emotion.

This article applies a synthetic approach ofphilological, religious, philosophical, and culturalstudies to explore the original meaning of the termsdao 道 and de 德,two primary concepts in traditional Chineseintellectual history. Through an etymologicalanalysis of the characters dao andde, and supported by bothreceived and discovered texts and materials, thisarticle demonstrates that daooriginally represented the spirit of the PoleStar/High God and the movement of Heaven, andde, in relation todao, originally represented theimpartial virtue and power of Heaven. In terms ofthis new interpretation, the article furtherdiscusses the signification of daoand de in the Laozi to uncover themystic aspects of the text.

This article discusses the Mongol approach to warfare, then goes on to consider the Mongols' conversion to the notion that they would have to develop a siege train, since walled cities cannot easily be taken by a cavalry charge. The contribution of Chinese siege engineers is discussed, and there is a survey of Chinese siege techniques as they evolved before the Mongol period. The author considers the evidence for the use of inflammable materials, and then moves to the question of gunpowder. The widespread (not quite universal) consensus that the Chinese used gunpowder is discussed, and then attention moves to Hulegu's expedition to western Asia in the 1250s. It is pointed out that none of the major sources seems to imply the use of anything that might be construed as gunpowder technology during those campaigns. Lastly, the author considers, in some detail, sieges conducted by the Ilkhanid Mongols against Mamluk border strongholds during the succeeding decades, drawing attention to and explaining those sieges' increasing lack of success.

Between 1922 and 1953, the German-Dutch CatholicCongregation Societas Verbi Divini,SVD, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries orSteyl Missionaries, sent approximately 90missionaries to Northwest China. During these threedecades, the Divine Word Missionaries establishedsome 30 missionary stations (plus about 100out-stations) in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.

One of the most influential European printed sources on South-East Asia at the turn of the eighteenth century was the Scottish sea-captain Alexander Hamilton's memoirs. The picture he paints of the Portuguese communities that had existed since the period of Portuguese ascendancy in the sixteenth century is overwhelmingly negative. But a close textual and empirical analysis of his text shows that not only was he frequently misinformed in terms of the historical developments relating to that community, but that he merely conforms to a set of standard rhetorical tropes we can associate with the Black Legend, which had grown up in Protestant countries of northern Europe since the 16th century to denigrate Portugal and her achievements. This article urges that this key text consequently be used with far greater circumspection than has hitherto been the case.

Tràng An is a Vietnamese government supported culturaland ecological park development covering 2,500hectares that is centred on an isolated massif onthe southern edge of the Song Hong delta in NinhBình Province, north Vietnam (Fig. 1). Thearchaeological investigation of Tràng An is beingled jointly by the Xuan Truong ConstructionCorporation and the McDonald Institute forArchaeological Research, University of Cambridge,under the direction of the lead author. TheCorporation is creating an ecologically sensitivedevelopment – the ‘Tràng An TourismResort’ – within this karstic landscape,which is also the subject of a planned applicationto UNESCO for World Heritage Site status.International involvement in this work has been atthe behest of Nguyêń Van Truong, the GeneralDirector of Xuan Truong and at the invitation of theNinh Bình People's Committee. The research itself iscarried out under the guidance of Nguyêń Van Son,the Tràng An Tourism Resort Project Manager. Themain focus of the May 2007 season was to undertakeexcavations at the site of Hang Boi (the‘Fortune-Teller's Cave’).

This article examines over 200 years (1761–1963) ofChina's relations with the Central Asian tribalstate of Hunza. Employing a territorial genealogicalapproach, this research explores how Hunza, notinitially recognised during the high Qing as aninner dependency or vassal, was graduallyre-conceptualised by the Qing court as a historicaltributary protectorate, and then in the Republicanand Nationalist eras became known as a ‘lostterritory’ ripe for restoration. It will also arguethat the tributary system is not a dynastic legacythat ceased to function after 1911; but rather, itwas an instrument of political expediency thatcontinued to be used in the post-imperial era. In asense, this research offers a new thinking about the‘tribute system’ which might really be a nineteenthand twentieth century reinterpretation of an olderform of symbolically asymmetric interstate relations(common in one form or another throughout many partsof Asia); this reinterpretation was stronglyinformed by English-language terminology andformulations, including ‘suzerainty’ and themistranslation of ‘gong’ as ‘tribute’ itself, andboth Britain and China manipulated the terminologyand claimed to further their respective territorial,diplomatic and strategic interests.

This article first briefly examines the textual structure of the Brāhmaṇa Saṃyutta of the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya in conjunction with two other versions preserved in Chinese translation in Taishō vol. 2, nos 99 and 100. Then it compares the main teachings contained in the three versions. These three versions of this collection on the subject of the Brāhmaṇas represent three different early Buddhist schools within the Sthavira branch. This comparative study of these three different versions focuses on three major topics: the outcaste, the dharmas that are good for a layperson, and alms. It reveals similarities and significant differences in structure and doctrinal content, thus advancing the historical/critical study of early Buddhist doctrine in this area.