According to Islamic geographical texts, the route that passed along the southern bank of the Gamasiab River on the current Bisotun–Sahneh plain, connecting Kermanshah (Qarmisin) and Bisotun (Behistun) to Madharan, Kangavar (Qasr al-Lusus), and Nahavand, was very significant during the early Islamic centuries. However, based on archaeological evidence, it seems that a major part of this importance was attributed to the construction projects of the Sassanids, especially the later kings of the Sassanian Dynasty, such as Khosrow II, who focused on developing the current Kermanshah province, especially the Kermanshah–Bisotun region, and built extensive constructions including communication roads, bridges, palaces, and magnificent mansions along the southern bank of the Gamasiab River. The present research specifically and comprehensively investigates, for the first time, the southern route of the Gamasiab River in the southern part of the Bisotun–Sahneh plain and localises seven historical toponyms along this route. This research is mainly based on the analysis of Islamic geographical texts, especially those from the ninth and tenth centuries. Additionally, archaeological evidence such as the remains of old bridges, buildings, and sites, as well as the topographical and geographical features of the region, have been taken into consideration.

East Asia is rarely identified as a distinctly Muslim space. This article sheds light on the hitherto neglected history of modern East Asia as a site of Muslim activity and encounters. Mobile Muslims, who travelled and migrated to the East Asian space in the course of imperial globalization, often suffered discrimination as colonized subjects, but in other instances benefitted from imperial privileges and protection. The Tatars of Harbin, who came to Manchuria as Russian subjects, are emblematic, but understudied, actors in this regard. The city of Harbin, administered by the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a rapidly growing transport hub and colonial settlement in Manchuria. Similar to colonial port cities, Harbin simultaneously exhibited characteristics of both the metropolis and the multi-ethnic and multi-religious composition of the empire. This situation created many opportunities for Tatars to seek their fortunes, especially in trade. Zooming in on the Harbin Tatars, this article discusses, first, the place of Tatar Muslims and their institutions in Harbin’s colonial society; second, the intertwining of notions of (economic) competition in the colonial space with ideas of progress and decline; and third, the potential for Muslim encounters across colonial boundaries. Taking into account the Muslim side of modern East Asian history is not only an essential part of understanding the development of global connections, it also helps us to rethink the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized, and focus our attention on the ambitions of Muslim actors in shaping their futures across the colonial space.

The genus Elaphurus Milne-Edwards, 1866, now represented solely by Père David’s deer (E. davidianus Milne-Edwards, 1866), exhibited considerable diversity during the Pleistocene of Eurasia, including the debated E. formosanus (Shikama, 1937) from the Middle Pleistocene of Tainan, Taiwan. The taxonomic validity of E. formosanus has been questioned due to incomplete material and morphological similarities with E. d. predavidianus Dong et al., 2019. Here, we describe new antler remains of E. formosanus from the Pleistocene of Taiwan and reassess the taxonomic status of the species. These fossils reveal diagnostic characters, including a shorter anterior beam, well-developed accessory tine structures, and a markedly reduced size compared to other Elaphurus species. Combined with geological age and paleobiogeographic evidence, these features support the recognition of E. formosanus as a valid, endemic species. Interestingly, our comparative analyses of antler size measurements further reveal that E. formosanus represents the smallest-bodied species, possessing an exceptionally diminutive stature among the genus. This finding, supported by multiple lines of evidence, suggests that this species underwent dwarfism, a condition documented for the first time in Elaphurus and representing the first dwarfed cervid species in Taiwan. The distinctive antler development also highlights the potential roles of sexual selection and paleogeography in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of this species. Our reassessment of E. formosanus not only provides additional evidence for the diversity of Elaphurus but also elucidates dwarf adaptation, antler evolution, and the declining diversity of the genus through the Pleistocene.

This article explores the global imagining of China as a site of Islamization at the turn of the twentieth century. While previous scholarship examined this fantasy-making among European Orientalists and Christian missionaries, we put the writings of the latter in dialogue with other (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish) discursive nodes and networks in the Middle East, as well as those of Chinese Muslims, highlighting the production and co-constitution of this narrative on a global scale. We argue that by the late nineteenth century the birth and spread of this narrative was tied to the growing acceptance of a particular conception of religion as a classificatory framework wherein ‘world religions’, as bywords for separate civilizations, were locked in intense Darwinian competition with one another. Entangled with narrational processes like the invention of global religions and the construction of the Muslim world, the vision of an Islamized China became a fertile (and long-lived) battleground for a wide range of imperial anxieties, anti-colonial aspirations, and minority counterclaims, many of which we explore in this article.

This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an [A$'$] feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an [A$'$] feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch syntactic analyses of each type of quantifier.

Our Forum envisions East Asia as part of Islamic Asia, treating it as a space where Muslim communities have forged cross-border networks across time, episodically, and where discourses about Islam have circulated and been appropriated in interconnection with Muslim-majority regions of the continent (that is, ‘Islamic’ Asia). We hold that Islam, as a constellation of religious, political, cultural, and social formations, questions the spatial and conceptual boundaries of East Asia, while East Asia expands the known geographies of Islamic Asia. The articles in this Forum show that Islam was a shared paradigm of meaning-making across inter-Asian geographies, and offered alternative modes and axes of spatial production and political idioms that both Muslims and non-Muslims latched onto across Asia, including its easternmost reaches.

Drawing on archival sources from Albania, China, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, this article places the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) response to the Prague Spring in 1968 within an international framework. The available documentation suggests that DRV policymakers repeatedly expressed deep concern about Alexander Dubček’s radical reform programme and, prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion, signalled their support for external intervention. The article moreover contends that Hanoi’s stance reflected broader anxieties about its own national reunification struggle, fears of ideological destabilization, and continued reliance on fraternal assistance.

The founding fathers of the Turkish Republic worked to create “an imagined community” that would define them as Turks, regardless of their ethnic differences or primordial bonds with the “homeland.” Their rules were simple: if someone identifies as a Turk, they will be accepted as one. Within that framework, Afro-Turks, descendants of Africans brought to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, became part of the new nation through citizenship, linguistic assimilation, and everyday participation in the civic rituals. Their visible difference did not prevent their integration, reflecting a model that operated through legal and cultural criteria rather than formal racial hierarchy. Yet their recent articulation of an “Afro-Turk” identity raises deeper questions about the mechanisms through which Turkishness is produced, negotiated, and transformed, particularly amid the post-2000 identity landscape, where new nationalist discourses and large-scale migration have reshaped how difference is perceived and accommodated. Drawing on in-depth interviews and historical analysis, this article demonstrates that Afro-Turks’ long-standing incorporation reflects the workings of everyday nationalism, symbolic whiteness, and conditional inclusion. Their experience shows that the republican promise of equality is realized most fully when difference is demographically small, politically unthreatening, and culturally unobtrusive, revealing the tacit norms that continue to structure belonging in Türkiye.