I would like to thank the Royal Asiatic Society warmly for allowing me the privilege of giving today's lecture on Dr Otto Samson. It is both an honour and a responsibility to speak of a person whom one has never known and whom others knew so much better, and I should perhaps explain why I of all people should be standing here today.

That history may be read as literature is an aesthetic judgment, which does not deflect from the essential difference between the two modes. To paraphrase Gibbon, who above all in this context knew what he was talking about, “the end of history is truth … the end of poetry is pleasure”. History, by definition, must fail to attain its ultimate goal of recreating the past “exactly as it happened”: that such is the case, whether because of the fallibility of the human intellect, or the difficulty (but not impossibility) of constructing history in a non-linear mode, or even – that stock excuse of historians – the doubtful, maybe putatively “fictional” quality of “the sources” – does not mean, as is from time to time suggested, that the attempt should not be made, or that history and fiction are indistinguishable. Intent, in this context, is all, nor should one forget that earlier proponents of fictionalised history may on occasion prove to be somewhat uncomfortable intellectual bedfellows.

Man's moral responsibility for his actions is a tenet of Islamic revelation which no Muslim has ever tried to reject. Likewise, the notion of God's omnipotence, which the Qur'ān teaches, has never been challenged by Muslims. However, there is a great difficulty in explaining how true moral responsibility coincides with God's omnipotence; if God creates all things, He also creates man's actions, and this being the case, man cannot be responsible for them. As is well known, the Mu'tazilite solution to the antinomy of God's omnipotence and man's responsibility consists in affirming man's capability, granted to him by God, of creating his own works. Adhering to their principle of God's justice, the Mu'tazilites asserted that if God were to create a man's unbelief while commanding him to believe, He would be unjust in punishing him for unbelief, since the man could not, in this situation, help but disbelieve. According to them, ought implies can. In upholding man's responsibility for his own actions, the Mu'tazilites saved God's justice, but according to the Ash'arites, detracted from God's omnipotence. The Ash'arites taught that since God is the sole creator, He creates human actions. In order to safeguard both God's omnipotence and man's responsibility, al-Ash'arī, having been influenced by the teaching of al-Najjār, developed a theory of kasb (lit. acquisition) according to which God creates man's actions while man appropriates them and thus becomes responsible for them.

It is a strange circumstance, yet one immediately observable, that the Parsi community in India, so innovative and so energetically creative in many other respects, has failed to distinguish itself in the sphere of indigenous arts. In the acquisition of tastes and skills in European or hybrid pseudo-Persian architecture, in European-style portraiture, and in Classical music, the Parsis have been diligent, even as they long ago became eloquent masters of the English tongue. What of their arts can properly be called Zoroastrian?

In his description of the excellent city (Kitāb al-siyāsat al-madaniyah and 'Ārā ahl al-madīnah al-fāḍilah), al-Fārābī mentions those citizens who are not philosophers, but rather the opponents of the principles of their community. To these groups, of which several are enumerated al-Fārābī refers either as “the rest” (al-Bāqūn), or, “al-Nawābit”. It is this group, and in particular this name, that is intriguing, for although on the face of it it carries no politico-religious significance at all, some conclusions that touch upon these fields may be drawn by scrutinizing it. I would like to show that al-Fārābī abstracted the private name of the Nawābit and gave it the meaning of “opposition”. In order to do this I will analyze his use of the name along the following lines: first a short survey of the lexical usage of the root nbt; then I will show that the Nawābit were regarded by al-Fārābī as oppositional; then that they belong to the excellent cities; that their description entails all areas of political activity; that al-Fārābī was aware of the meaning of the name; that he used it in an abstract manner and the reasons for his choosing this particular name for “opposition”. Secondly I will show the earlier use of the name by a real historical group, and finally its later use by Ibn Bājjah

Midway through his account of the fortunes of the Barmakids in his Murūj aldhahab wa-ma'ādin al-jawhar, al-Masʽūdī (d. 956) introduces a debate on love said to have taken place in the majlis of Yaḥyā ibn Khālid al-Barmakī. Yaḥyā, described as a man of great learning devoted to philosophical discussion, invited the theologians who frequented his salon, and who had previously debated on a variety of philosophical and theological topics, “to speak of love ['ishq], without disputing, each presenting whatever occurs to him as it comes to his mind”. A number of definitions are offered, followed by additional comments by Mas'ūdī; the whole constitutes a substantial digression which intervenes between the depiction of the Barmakids at the height of their power and the account of their fall from favour.

The 39-year old Engelbert Kaempfer sighted the Siamese coast on 1 June 1690, and on 7 June his ship entered the river Chao Phraya, and reached the Dutch residence “Amsterdam”. Three days later he arrived in the Thai capital, Ayutthaya. Almost a month later, on 4 July, Kaempfer's boat began its journey downriver, spending some days loading goods at “Amsterdam”, and on 10 July he left Siamese territory, continuing his journey to Japan.

Two important contemporary authors provide primary sources for the history of Qalāwūn's reign. The first of these, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʽAbd al-Ẓahir, had been the head of Baybars's chancery, and continued to hold office, possibly until his death in 692/1293. He was, however, overtaken during his lifetime by his son, Fatḥ al-Dīn, whom Qalāwūn appointed to the new post of confidential secretary (kātib al-sirr). Muḥyī al-Dīn was the author of Baybars's official biography, a Rawḍ al-zāhirfisirat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir – indeed one might say that he ghosted the memoirs recounted to him by the sultan. In due course he also produced the official biography of Qalāwūn, Tashrlf al-ayyām wa 'l-'uṣūr fi sīrat al-Malik al-Manṣūr, of which unfortunately only the latter part, beginning with the year 680/1281–82, is now extant. A great deal of the value of this work lies in the state papers it transmits. These include the texts of truces with the Templars, Acre, Lesser Armenia, and the Lady Margaret of Tyre, as well as treaties (also formally truces in Islamic international law) with Aragon and Genoa.

Calicut was the most important port in southwest India during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century. Its rulers, the Zamorins, maintained a vast network of trading relations extending from the coast of East Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and the Far East. This is amply documented in the accounts of foreign travellers, practically all of whom passed through the Malabar ports on the lengthy voyage from west to east and back. Marco Polo, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 'Abd al-Razzāq, to name but a few, figure most prominently in a long line of writers whose reports describe various aspects of old Colychachia, as Calicut was then called by Nicolo di Conti, an Italian traveller.

The Ming maritime expeditions organized by Cheng Ho during the reign of Emperor Yung-lo have been studied intensively by Sinologists and the historians of the eastern Indian Ocean. The scattered references in the Islamic sources to the arrival of Chinese ships at the Middle Eastern ports on the other hand have not been properly collated with the evidence from Chinese historical sources. While working on Ibn Taghrī Birdī's history of Mamlūk Egypt, I accidentally came across a passage which graphically describes the possible economic impact of the Ming voyages on the revenue of local rulers. The historian was referring to the last expedition and the arrival of ships during the reign of al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbay.

The following contribution is based on several assumptions: First, it is assumed that the oral traditions of verbal art, whether “fixed” in writing/print or not, belong legitimately to the bulk of a national literature; second, it is assumed that such oral traditions have been grossly neglected, misunderstood and/or misinterpreted; third, when speaking of a “tradition”, what I have in mind is not an authoritative dogmatism based on set doctrines, but a fountain-source from which stems a continuous stream of thought and culture, irrespective of whether it is orally transmitted, or fixed in literary texts.

It has often been asserted that Tibetan society and culture were (in recent times at least) unadaptable, unchanging and set in an outworn mould. This kind of assertion has been made both by those who employ it to prop up a claim to superiority and overlordship over the Tibetans and by poorly informed writers with scanty knowledge of the people, language and history of Tibet and hence of what they are purporting to write about. This book assembles much evidence to show that Tibetans, their society and their culture were by no means as unchanging as some have either chosen to maintain or have been led to believe.

A conspicuous feature of Ottoman history from the sixteenth century onwards, or even of fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, is that the mass of surviving administrative documents, well complemented by European sources, makes it possible to apply a range of economic and social concepts to illuminate their economy and society. For Persia the documents are far fewer and, even where, as in seventeenth-century Iṣfahān, the extant Safavid documents are exceptionally well complemented by European source material, doubts, often of a Marxian or Braudelian order, on the legitimacy of applying European concepts to Persian society are often entertained. In other periods the paucity of material is compounded by ethnic diversity – tribal versus settled populations; Turks versus Iranians or Iranians versus Turco-Mongols, all with deeply rooted authentic traditions – which is rarely documented, let alone explained, by the contemporary historians. It is almost as if the right kind of anthropologist could do more than the historian to exploit what material there is.

Mrs. Jacob has provided us with a translation, for the first time in English, of the most important text in classical Cambodian literature, with an introduction and critical notes and lists, which will be of great help to anyone studying the Cambodian text. The Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa was composed anonymously by at least three authors over three centuries, and is divided into two parts. The earliest writer, of the sixteenth century, accounts for about a fifth of the first part, covering the main events of the Bālakāṇḍa and Ayodhyakāṇḍa. It was continued in the seventeenth century with the story up to Rāvaṇa's assembling the remnants of his army for the final battle with Rāma: but Rāvaṇa's death, the rescue of Sītā and her trial by fire, and the triumphant return to Ayodhya, are all missing. The second part of the Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa relates those events from the Uttarakāṇḍa which deal specifically with the later history of Rāma and Sītā: her second rejection and exile, the birth of their two sons, the meeting again, and Sītā's going down into the earth. This part is believed to have been composed in the eighteenth century.