Since “visions appear material to spiritual persons only, the vulgar herd of historians and annalists cannot hope to be so favoured by Heaven”. So, in his nineteenth-century account of the sūfīs of Sind, Sir Richard Burton expressed the dilemma of scholars researching Muslim dream and visionary experiences in his characteristic style. But while scholarly discussion of the visionary activities of premodern sūfīs and other Muslims is still no straightforward matter we need no longer be deterred by Burton's sardonic pessimism. Despite the reticence of earlier generations of positivist scholarship, the past two decades have witnessed a flourishing of research into the visionary aspects of Muslim religious and cultural practice, chiefly through the analysis of the extensive literature surrounding the dream and vision in Islam. For, from the very beginning of Islamic history, there has developed a rich and varied discourse on the nature of the imagination and its expression in the form of dreams and waking visions. The theoretical approaches to the imagination developed by early Muslim philosophers and mystical theorists were always accompanied by the activities of a more active sodality of dreamers and vision seekers. For this reason, Islamic tradition is especially rich for its contributions to both theories of the imagination and the description of its expression in dream and visionary experience. The abundant yields from this rich research field in recent years afford new insight into the Muslim past, allowing an often intimate encounter with past individuals and private experiences scarcely granted by the analysis of other kinds of documentation.

The ex-Portuguese town of Diu on the island with thesame name off the south coast of Saurashtra,Gujarat, is one of the best-preserved and yetleast-studied Portuguese colonial towns. Diu was thelast of the Portuguese strongholds in India, thecontrol of which was finally achieved in 1539 aftermany years of futile struggle and frustratingnegotiations with the sultanate of Gujarat. Duringthe late sixteenth and seventeenth century Diuremained a main staging post for Portuguese trade inthe Indian Ocean, but with the appearance of theDutch, and later the French and British, on thescene the island gradually lost its strategicimportance. The town was subjected to littlerenovation during the nineteenth century while inthe twentieth century Diu was no more than anisolated Portuguese outpost with meagre trade untilit was taken over by India in 1961. As a result,unlike the other former Portuguese colonies in India– Daman and Goa – Diu has preserved most of itsoriginal characteristics: a Portuguese colonial townplan, a sixteenth-century fort and a number of oldchurches, as well as many of the eighteenth andnineteenth-century houses.

When the decisive battle of the Yarmuk in 636 AD gavethe Muslim Arabs control of Syria, they gained aland that had been Roman for 700 years. Yet in thememory of most of its inhabitants, their recentsubjection to the Sassanian Persians would have beenfresh and even dominant. The forces of Chosroes II,which had controlled Syria for a generation, hadonly been withdrawn in 630. Anyone who had reachedadulthood by the time the Arabs arrived had alreadyexperienced the Persian occupation; many were bornor raised during it. This period of Persian rule,which lasted twenty years or more in Syria,Mesopotamia and Armenia, fifteen in Palestine andten in Egypt, may have played a major role inaccustoming the locals to non-Roman rule, or mayhave had violently disruptive effects thatfacilitated the subsequent Arab conquest. So far,the period has been poorly known and never studiedas a whole, allowing many theories to be projectedupon it. For the most part, historians andespecially archaeologists have assigned to thePersians a highly negative and destructive role.

Debate and controversy have bedevilled the subject of social banditry. The early writing on social banditry saw it as primitive rebellion, as prepolitical and antithetical to class consciousness. Another approach identified it with weak state formation. The literature on South Asia saw social banditry as absent having been eroded by the institutional structure of caste. This article examines and critiques some of these theses on banditry. It argues, firstly, that social banditry can be simultaneous with a phase of intensified state formation. The specific theme investigated here is the interaction of the king, peasant and bandit in an Indian kingdom under late colonialism. A window to this universe is opened up by a folk epic from the oral tradition of a community of Muslims called the Meos. Far from being prepolitical, banditry raises crucial questions with respect to authority and legitimacy. This narrative not only interrogates the legitimacy of kingship, it also challenges the authority of the colonial state. Secondly, the article challenges the argument of South Asian exceptionalism to banditry that is perhaps easier to refute. Thirdly, as this article demonstrates, banditry need not relate to a pre-industrial capitalist world. Our bandit narrative indicates the reverberations of industrialism and attendant exchange relations and institutions in the colony even though it belongs to an area of ‘indirect’ rule.

Luri is an Indo-Iranian language cluster with over fourmillion speakers. The Luri ethnic area is found insouthwestern Iran and southeastern Iraq, althoughsmaller numbers of speakers have emigrated toelsewhere in Asia and a number of cities in theWest.

Detective fiction counts amongst the most successfulliterary products that the metropolitan west hasexported to the world periphery. Between the end ofthe nineteenth century and the outbreak of theSecond World War the genre acquired a globalpresence – both in the form of translations ofexisting works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories,and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations.This kind of literature represented a prime exampleof the mass-produced and mass-circulated printentertainment that was part and parcel of theemergence of mass consumption as a social form.Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and anexpression of modernity. While some literarytheorists have pointed to longstanding historicalantecedents, detective fiction would not have madesense in earlier historical epochs. The principlesof scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout,not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifyingglasses, finger-prints and assorted scientificapparatuses, but in terms of the subject matteritself – the fact that it is possible to make senseof an increasingly confusing world by uncoveringhidden causal connections through rationalenquiry.

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a givenChinese character may change its meaning when itsreading is altered slightly. Modern scholars havesought principles for these changes, and from thoseprinciples have reconstructed a skeletal system ofearly Chinese morphology – with such elements asderivation by tone change, causative infixes,transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arrestingfact that some of pre-modern China's linguisticallymost astute scholars inveighed against the multiplereadings on which this research is based. They seemto have held strong opinions, not always madeexplicit, about precisely how it is that Chinesecharacters represent language. These two views,modern and traditional, represent fundamentallydifferent models of how early Chinese evolved intomodern Chinese.

From the beginning of Orientalist studies of the Muslimworld, it was axiomatic to define certain religiousphenomena in terms of their origins. Because of thetendency to view all Eastern doctrines asessentially alike, Orientalist scholars of theRomantic period invariably defined Sufism as amysticism that was Indian in origin; from the firstappearance of the term in European languages,“Sufism” was characterised as essentially Lookingback at this early scholarship today, it issurprising that this unanimous belief in the Indianorigin of Sufism was almost entirely unconnected toany historical evidence. From the days of SirWilliam Jones and Sir John Malcolm to relativelyrecent times, this opinion has had a remarkablelongevity, despite the ludicrous appearance of someof these claims today. As an example one mayconsider the outrageous claim of Max Horten, in a1928 study that sought to explain Sufism as a pureexpression of Vedanta: “No doubt can any longerremain that the teaching of Hallaj (d. 922) and hiscircle Another pertinent example is found in anobservation of William James in his 1902 GiffordLectures, published as The Varieties ofReligious Experience:

In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and variousdervish bodies are the possessors of the mysticaltradition. The Sufis have existed in Persia from theearliest times, and as their pantheism is so atvariance with the hot and rigid monotheism of theArab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism musthave

James's remark illustrates, innocently enough, howwidely this opinion was shared at the time by theacademic world in Europe and America. It is easierto see from the perspective of the later twentiethcentury that this opinion was conditioned bynineteenth-century racial attitudes as well asassumptions about the unchanging nature ofreligions.

Robert Morrison (1782–1834; Chinese name: Maˇ Liˇxùn) was the London Missionary Society's first representative in China and is generally viewed as the father of Protestant missionary work there. Modern scholarly interest in him has in the main focused on his role as a Bible translator (see, for example, Zetzsche 1999, especially Chapter 2). As part of his missionary activities, Morrison studied both written and spoken Chinese; and these researches yielded grammars of both Mandarin (i.e. Guānhuà “the language of the mandarins or officials”; Morrison, 1815) and Cantonese (1815: appendix, pp. 259–280), plus a major dictionary of written Chinese (1815–1823) and a smaller lexicon of Cantonese (1828). In order to transcribe spoken Chinese, Morrison developed romanisations for both Mandarin and Cantonese. These orthographic systems shed light on the pronunciation of the underlying languages as they were spoken two hundred years ago. The purpose of the present paper is to examine Morrison's romanisation of Mandarin for clues about the pronunciation of early nineteenth-century standard Chinese.

Research on the subject of Chinese communism has longbeen marred by the “spotlight approach”, which, asKathleen Hartford rightly criticises, “illuminateskey actors and events, but leaves in the shadow theaction transpiring in the corners of the historicalstage”. Assuming that only a few great names andsignal events bear relevance to its development,such an approach often produces simplified picturesof the Chinese communist revolution. During the lastdecade or so, however, an increasing number ofhistorians have begun to take seriously the greatcomplexities and diversities involved in thisrevolutionary movement. Using newly availablecommunist Party sources, they have ventured toexcavate forgotten or even deliberately ignoredepisodes in the history of the Chinese CommunistParty (CCP). In so doing, they have not onlyexpanded the scope of enquiry in Chinese communismbut also provided new evidence for testing oldinterpretive structures. This article joins thattrend by presenting the little-known story of theCommunist struggle in rural areas of the Guangdongprovince from 1928 to 1936.

Usually the European perception of South Asia and,related to it, academic research into this region,is informed by specific, powerful images andmetaphors that establish a dichotomisation of theworld. The reasons for this development cannot beanalysed in detail here. Suffice it to say, however,that this organisation and designation of the worldhas deep roots. Until the Reformation, Europe wasbasically perceived only in terms of geographicalboundaries. But the dichotomy between “Europe” and“Asia” acquired a new dimension in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, when, in the wake of achange of paradigm into modernity, Europeanself-consciousness gradually developed into a senseof European intellectual superiority. Just as a newform of collective identity had developed within theboundaries of Europe, based on the idea of “nation”in the late eighteenth century, and just as themembers of the early nation-states forciblydissociated themselves by definition from members ofother societies in order to be able to establishtheir own identity, now, with the same intention,though on a different level, Europeans dissociatedthemselves from “Asia”, the “Orient” and “Islam”.The political recollection of important masternarratives kept the mythical fictions in mind andimbued the nation-building process with enormousreal power. This development towards a modernEuropean identity was based, as can be deduced frommany travellers' testimonies, on the history ofreception, reciprocal perceptions, and thedevelopment of enemy images. In this process, theOrient and the Orientals were also used by Europeansas a didactic background for the critique of theirown (European) urban societies. The literarytechnique of contextual alienation and distancing,such as can be found in Montesquieu's “PersianLetters”, was born in this period. These andfollowing processes of projection were connectedamong others things with the fact that Europeans, ascolonial masters, advanced to confront the worldoutside Europe. There they were faced with attitudesand norms that forced them to question their ownperceptions. In doing so, they also tended to acceptsome of these strange and different ideas, and,thus, exposed themselves to cultural hybridisationwhich could then only be overcome by thereconstructing of their own culture as something“pure”, in contrast to the “degenerate” culture ofthe colonialised. In this way, collectiveantagonisms developed. Even the Oriental crusadesthat had been critically evaluated by Europeanacademicians, were now for the first time perceivedin terms of cultural clash. Analogously, Europe andAsia were constructed in the eighteenth century andvery predominantly in the nineteenth century interms of arenas of power politics. For instance, itwas during this time that the eastern borders ofEurope were conceptualised, with the Balkans andTransoxania being considered as buffers or gapsbetween the two.

A brief glance at any bibliography for a history of Cambodia written in the last hundred years will reveal the immense preoccupation that historians have had with the institution of kingship. Yet nothing has been written on autonomously ruling queens, despite the acceptance by some twentieth-century historians that at least two such queens apparently ruled in pre-classical Cambodia (c. 50-802). These female sovereigns have been considered an anomaly, their reigns evidence that the political and social fabric of pre-classical society was rent asunder by the intrusion of female rulers into a male domain. Such a scenario is at variance with epigraphic evidence. One of the queens accepted by twentieth-century historians as an autonomous female ruler belongs to the eleventh century, not the seventh, as previously determined. Moreover, it appears that in most pre-classical Cambodian polities, women held the power of sovereignty, even if they did not rule independently. This not only raises questions regarding the accepted understanding of gender and power in pre-classical Cambodia, but also calls for a revision of pre-classical Cambodian history.

D. N. MacKenzie was a scholar of Middle and ModernIranian languages who has left an impressive body ofpublications.

Annemarie Brigitte Schimmel, who died aged 80 on 26th January 2003, was the West's most outstanding expert on Sufism, classical and folk Islamic poetry, Indo-Pakistani literature, and calligraphy.

A leading Japanese scholar of Chinese history who was based in Kansai, Ôba Osamu (1927–2002) spent a highly productive career, holding appointments from 1953 onwards at Seishin Joshi Daigaku, Ryûkoku Daigaku and Osaka Daigaku. A Professor of Kansai Daigaku in 1965, he later served there as the head of the Faculty of Letters (Bungaku bu) and at one time as Director of the University Library. Outside Japan he held short-term appointments, or was invited to be a visiting scholar, at a number of centres of learning, including some in China (Liaoning, Shandong, Hong Kong and Beijing), the United States of America (Princeton), Belgium (Leuven) and the United Kingdom (Cambridge and London). He held the title of Guest Professor in the Archaeological Research Institute, Gansu, and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing.