The Khojas are a caste-based community that emerged in the fourteenth century across Sindh, Kutch, and Kathiawar.* For centuries, they maintained a distinct identity that blended Hindu and Islamic traditions, which resisted rigid classification within either religious framework. The nineteenth century, however, brought profound change through two major schisms that reshaped their religious and social identity. The first, rooted in disputes over the authority of the Aga Khan, culminated in the 1866 Aga Khan Case and prompted some to align with Sunni Islam. The second, a theological rupture, led to the rise of Isna Ashari Khojas. This shift was influenced by Twelver Shiʿi mujtahids in Najaf and Karbala, who, through Indian Shiʿi ʿulamāʾ and mullās, reshaped Khoja religious identity. This article explores the central role of Twelver Shiʿi networks and their transregional reach in shaping this transformation. It focuses on how changes in legal identity, religious authority, and migratory patterns across Bombay, Zanzibar, and the shrine cities of Iraq contributed to the emergence of a distinct Isna Ashari Khoja identity. In doing so, it situates Khoja transformations within a wider historical context of religious affiliation and social organisation across South Asia and East Africa.

The existence of international legal obligations which bind domestic non-State actors (DNSAs) is well-established throughout public international law, particularly in international criminal law and international humanitarian law. Yet the conceptual foundation of such obligations remains unclear—whilst the obligations of States and international organisations are rooted in the concept of consent, the international obligations of DNSAs are inherently non-consensual. There have been several attempts to explain the existence of DNSA obligations in particular areas of international law, but no account has provided a convincing general explanation. The unsettled conceptual basis of DNSA international obligations has given rise to controversy around their existence and legitimacy and whether it is desirable or possible to create international obligations for DNSAs in other areas, such as international human rights law. This article fills this gap by advancing a general account of the basis of the international obligations of DNSAs. The article builds on the most persuasive elements of existing accounts to argue that States have a capacity to impose international obligations on DNSAs which does not depend on any preexisting relationship or connection.

This paper introduces the general ideas for parametric integral stochastic orders, with which a continuum of parametric functions are defined as a bridge between different classes of non-parametric functions. This approach allows one to identify a parametric function class over which two given random variables may violate the non-parametric stochastic order with specific patterns. The parameter used to name the parametric function class also measures the ratio of dominance violation for the corresponding non-parametric stochastic orders. Our framework, expanding the domain of stochastic orders, covers the existing studies of almost stochastic dominance. This leads to intuitive explanations and simpler proofs of existing results and their extensions.

Towards the end of his al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmīyat al-ʿAjam, Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363/764) aims a peculiar slight at his sometime teacher Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328/728), likening him to two famous executed heretics, al-Suhrawardī (d. circa 1191/587) and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 759/142), in their shared ‘lack of reason’. Though often cited as evidence that al-Ṣafadī held his famous contemporary’s intelligence in low regard, the insult is more specifically aimed at his lack of discretion. In this article, I examine how Ibn Taymiyya is portrayed across the Sharḥ and argue that, when paired with insights from the book about al-Ṣafadī’s own language-centred hermeneutics, we gain a number of interesting insights into this prolific historian and adīb. The first is that he was closely familiar with and even mimicked aspects of the culture of ‘esoteric disclosure’, including in his criticism of Ibn Taymiyya and his indiscretion. Al-Ṣafadī also emerges as something of an exemplar of what Thomas Bauer has called Islam’s ‘cultural ambiguity’, whose final criticism of Ibn Taymiyya and of the heretics to whom he is likened is not any specific one of their beliefs, but rather their inability to exercise discretion in expressing them.

While ancient people defined themselves largely by their ability to employ correct speech in Greek or Latin, many early Christians discussed a foreign type of speech from heaven. This celestial communication medium created a different criterion to establish status and identity in Christian communities. This article explores conceptions of this heavenly speech in Sethian and Valentinian writings, as well as in Ignatius. Sethians and Valentinians appeal to different sensory perceptions to describe celestial communication. For Sethians, heavenly speech is imbued with light and is conceptualized through visual frameworks, whereas for Valentinians, celestial communication functions like smell. In contrast, Ignatius associates celestial speech with a person: the bishop. That is, Ignatius defines celestial communication as whatever the bishop communicates, whether spoken or silent. For all these second- and third-century Christians, correct employment of celestial speech forges a unique social structure and reifies boundaries for a given in-group.

Alleged victims have often played a central role in litigation aimed at prompting climate change mitigation. Courts have identified such victims in order to grant plaintiffs standing to sue, justify their invocation of individual rights and consider claims for compensation. This article observes, however, that no individual can really be, at least in a strict legal sense, a victim of a State or an entity’s failure to mitigate climate change. This is because, while climate wrongs certainly harm society, they do not harm specific individuals in a sufficiently direct and proximate way. This observation has major implications for climate litigation, but it is not a fatal flaw: the absence of victims does not necessarily preclude litigation as, for instance, standing can often be established on sounder legal grounds.

The genetic basis of rapid and uniform seed germination and its associated traits is crucial for improving seed vigour and seedling establishment for higher productivity in direct-seeded rice (DSR) systems. This study investigates the phenotypic diversity and genetic architecture of germination traits in 163 rice genotypes, using a genome-wide association studies (GWAS). An association panel of 163 diverse rice genotypes, including varieties, germplasm and breeding lines, was evaluated for seed germination traits over 2 years (2022 and 2023). The panel was genotyped using 295 simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, including 80 random SSRs and 215 candidate gene SSRs linked to seed traits and morphological attributes. The genotyping of 163 lines with 295 markers revealed a range of genetic diversity, with polymorphic information content values between 0.04 and 0.93. Population structure analysis indicated the presence of two groups and four sub-groups. GWAS identified 80 significant marker-trait associations (MTAs) across 12 chromosomes at P ≤ 0.05, which narrow down to 18 MTAs at P ≤ 0.01. Twelve candidate genes are identified which were related with multiple traits, linked to important functions, such as seed-size regulation, nutrient mobilization and plant growth. Candidate gene-based SSR (cgSSR) markers such as M169 (OsMIK), M57 (THIS1), M66 (GW2), and M18 (OsBAK1), displayed pleiotropy including rapid and uniform germination (germination index, germination rate index and mean germination time) traits. The newly identified candidate gene markers associated with seed rapid and uniform germination traits can be leveraged in marker-assisted breeding programs to introduce diverse alleles for enhanced seed vigour and crop establishment. Markers closely linked to multiple traits hold significant potential for the simultaneous improvement of several traits.

Philosophical analysis has long involved finding the “proper” form of a sentence, aiming to find a form that is “transparent” regarding its implications. Easy ontologists claim that finding the tacit ontological commitments of ordinary claims about the world is easy. Simple paraphrases and elementary deductions from those paraphrases will do, they claim. We find the easy ontologists’ arguments wanting. After examining the natures of idioms and paraphrase, we conclude that the so-called easy arguments provide no warrant for ontological conclusions as they have traditionally been understood. In several illustrative examples, we show that the easy ontologists preferred paraphrases are apt only if they carry no ontological implications, on pain of warranting ontological conclusions that are not credible.

Informal care for older people living with chronic life-limiting illnesses is associated with difficulties. The informal care system built around generational values and cultural norms is steadily weakening in rural Ghana because of economic challenges, migration, urbanisation, and changing family structure. In responding to this knowledge gap, we aimed to ascertain how the immediate family, extended family and community support impact on mechanisms underlying provision of informal care for older people living with chronic life-limiting illnesses. Ethnographic interviews were conducted amongst fifteen older people; fifteen informal caregivers; ten health care professionals, after participatory observations during six months of fieldwork utilised to gather the needed data. This study is guided by altruism, empathy, responsibility, self-interest, and social values theories, which provide a very significant structure to understand care relations in rural Ghana. While we find that informal care is sustained by cultural values, it is experiencing financial and human resource challenges.

The catalogue produced for the Armenian intermedial performance Ararat (1977) in Milan stands as the most significant remnant of an avant-garde project that combined music, painting and poetry. The volume includes musical scores by Ludwig Bazil and artwork by Herman Vahramian, artists connected to the Armenian community, as well as critical essays. Analysing the catalogue as an integral component of the performance demonstrates its role as an evocative remnant that aligns with the event’s intermediality. Drawing on archival studies, I argue that the catalogue embodies a metonymic relation to the performance, serving as a crucial tool for fostering a historiography of Milanese-Armenian cultural production. Ararat’s diasporic context amplifies the catalogue’s impact and contributes to the memory practices of the marginalized community. Steeped in affective resonance, the artefact incites the community to engage with cultural and historical narratives, contributing to a broader discourse on Armenian identity within the Milanese context.

The surge of online psychological assessments have brought the autism research community both opportunities and challenges: while they enable rapid large-scale data collection and more power to characterize individual differences, they also bring concerns about data quality, generalizability beyond online samples, and whether autistic traits can be reliably characterized with self-report measures administered online. Here we tackle these concerns by providing a systematic characterization of the autistic traits variability across individuals in a large cross-sectional dataset (N = 2826) as well as its temporal reliability within individuals in a test-retest dataset (N = 247), with both online and in-lab samples. We measured autistic traits using the Social Responsiveness Scale, 2nd version, Adult Self Report (SRS-2-ASR) – a tool that quantifies individual differences in autistic traits along a continuum for the general adult population. Across individuals, we found elevated SRS scores in online samples and were able to trace this effect to specific subsets of SRS items. SRS scores also covaried with internalizing symptoms, decreased with age, and were lower in women compared to other genders. Within individuals, we find moderate-to-good test-retest reliability of SRS scores over long intervals, with no difference between online and in-lab samples, suggesting robust temporal stability. We conclude that there are systematic differences in autistic traits between online and in-lab samples that are partly explained by systematic population-level differences in internalizing symptoms, particularly social anxiety. Future studies that sample across different populations should measure, control for, or stratify with respect to these factors.

What is philosophy? Some believe it is essentially an armchair discipline – something that we can do, roughly speaking, in our heads. It should to be distinguished from other, empirical disciplines such as physics, chemistry. However, others argue that there’s much more to philosophy than just armchair reflection. This dialogue explores these issues.