Shaykh Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Āqḥiṣārī (d. 1041/1632) is one of the most intriguing religious personalities of seventeenth-century Ottoman Turkey: although progress towards disclosing key aspects of his thought has been made recently – such as the association of al-Āqḥiṣārī with the Ottoman puritanical movement, the Qāḍīzādelis – the intellectual world-view of al-Āqḥiṣārī and, in particular, intellectual influences on his thought, are still hazy. This paper aims to make progress in this regard by studying the intellectual spring from which al-Āqḥiṣārī takes his conceptualisation of the religio-legal term bidʿa, the central theme of his seminal work, the Majālis al-abrār. In doing so, the paper finally puts to rest the vexed question over whether Shaykh al-Islām Taqī al-Dīn b. Taymiyya's writings had any influence in Ottoman Turkey prior to the advent of the 19th century reformist movements.

A persistent myth featuring in some modern accounts of the transition from Fatimid to Ayyubid rule (1169–71) is that one of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's (r. 1171–93) first actions upon attaining sovereignty over Egypt was to destroy the Fatimids’ book collections in their entirety. Medieval sources present a different, more nuanced depiction of books sold and dispersed over a decade or more, rather than extirpated and put out of circulation altogether. This article collects and examines medieval Arabic accounts of the episode, and finds further indications of the robust survival of Fatimid-era works in the composition of later chronicles, where native Fatimid-era accounts, which clearly did endure beyond the Fatimid age, are well-represented. The article also looks at the tendentious aspects of medieval accounts of Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn's policies, and the difficulties they pose to a modern appraisal of the sultan's character and intellectual-ideological tendencies.

In 2007 the translation into English of the first two books of Evliya Çelebi's (EÇ) Seyahatnâme by the celebrated Austrian diplomat and orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall was republished in the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) series Classics of Islam. Hammer's translation was based on what is now ms. RAS 22 in the RAS Library, and was first published under the auspices of the Oriental Translation Fund (OTF) in three parts: in 1834 (as Vol. I/i), 1846 (Vol. I/ii) and 1850 (Vol. II). It includes EÇ's account of his home city of Istanbul (Vol. I) and his first trip away – to Bursa in 1640 – as well as subsequent travels during the 1640s, including to Crimea, the Caucasus and northern Anatolia (Vol. II). The Committee of the OTF agreed to buy the manuscript and its continuation, now ms. RAS 23, from Hammer in 1832.

In this essay I will demonstrate the way in which the relationship between political authority and religious authority evolved throughout the history of Islam; and point out where religious rule gave way to the creation of nation states. I will map corresponding changes in Zakāt collections, among various nation states, to support my argument in favour of a continued separation of religious and political functions in contemporary nations with Muslim majority populations.

Britain's tentatively built diplomatic ties with Tibet received a jolt on 28 June 1913 when four Tibetan boys and their chaperone Kusho Lungshar went to meet George V, King of England and Emperor of India at Buckingham Palace. Lungshar and the boys brought with them an extensive range of gifts and letters from the thirteenth Dalai Lama, inadvertently giving the British government a diplomatic headache: not only could this potentially have been interpreted as a breach of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, but what should be given in return? By bringing together recently identified objects and archives now located in the British Museum, the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this paper will focus on the products of this encounter: the gifts. They will be considered here as statements of independence, signifiers of ‘Tibetanness’ and as examples of the developing protocols constructed by Britain in response to its encounter with Tibet.2

This article explores Gandhi's engagement with the industrial workers of Ahmedabad city and his effort to integrate them into urban society. As the emergence of a large textile industrial sector shaped Ahmedabad as one of the first industrial cities in India, migrants flowed into the city in search of work, and settled in makeshift slums surrounding the textile mills. Concepts such as citizen and citizenship were progressively redefined so as to place the whole city in counterpoint to the countryside. For the migrants, becoming a citizen meant conforming to a lifestyle which reflected the ideal model of urbanity. In 1918, one year before launching the first national satyagraha, Gandhi led the mill workers of Ahmedabad in a ‘righteous struggle’ in opposition to the city's industrialists. While he led the workers in their quest for higher wages, Gandhi also acted on a broader level to help workers integrate in the city as ‘citizens’.

Recognising the parallelism between the conjugation of a verb such as √lug ‘pour’ (pres. ldug, past blugs, fut. blug, imp. lhugs ‘pour’ and a verb such as √kru ‘wash’ (ḥkhrud, bkrus, bkru, khrus), Li Fang-Kuei suggests deriving the present stem ldug from a reconstruction *ḥlug (1933: 149). In this sub-case of Conrady's law, the change of *ḥl to ld- may be analyzed into the following changes: *ḥl > *ḥdl > *ḥld > ld (cf. Conrady 1896: 59, Li 1933: 149, Hill 2011: 446–447, Hill 2013: 193–195). This sound change obscures the synchronic relationship between verb forms beginning with ld- and other present formations, and the resultant synchronic opacity gives rise to analogical forms (e.g. the alternate present blug). Consequently, the dictionaries present a certain level of confusion about the paradigms of lateral initial verbs.

Albeit with some deterioration in recent years, Malaysia has a state with high levels of capacity that has achieved sustained economic growth through a commitment to macroeconomic stability and other pro-business measures. Recent comparative historical work argues that this state capacity is an institutional legacy of a specific model of British colonisation. While Malaysia is an amalgam of areas formerly under direct and indirect rule; the former – a model of colonisation characterised by the construction of a legal-rational bureaucracy with extensive geographic reach – was more prevalent. Prior to the transition to independence, the British increased the “direct” nature of their rule by creating a powerful central government that brought the various territories together. And, a concerted transition of power to a cohort of “bureaucrats-turned-politicians” ensured that the new nation's leaders inherited an intact state apparatus. However, a disproportionate number of these senior bureaucrats hailed from Johor, a state formerly under indirect rule - a colonial model associated with small, neo-patrimonial states with limited capacity. By using colonial sources to map the contours and composition of the Malayan state under British and, subsequently, Japanese rule, this article will explore the reasons for this paradox.

Aid donors, civil society groups and the Cambodian government have tended to focus their policy initiatives concerned with communities and their forests on Cambodia's indigenous minorities. Few attempts have been made to document the relationship between ethnic Khmers and forests. However, with almost three quarters of Cambodia covered with forests until quite recently, and a large proportion of the Khmer population living in proximity to forests, it is not surprising that Cambodia's dominant ethnic group has had a close and meaningful relationship with forests. In this article, we examine the traditional systems of forest management of Khmer social groups and how these systems are changing. We argue that traditional Khmer systems of forest management are still relevant in the context of the rapid changes that have occurred in rural Cambodia over the past two decades. These systems shape how Khmer groups make sense of the natural world and claim rights of tenure over forest areas. They continue to play a vital role in preserving Cambodia's natural forests in the face of deforestation driven by plantation schemes and logging operations.