There are close links between the anonymous Persian twelfth-century Bahr al-fawā'id, translated by Julie Scott Meisami as The sea of precious virtues: a medieval mirror for princes (Salt Lake City, 1991) and an Arabic work entitled Mufīd al-‘ulūm wa-mubīd al-humūm, variously attributed but probably by a certain Jamāl al-Din Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muhammad Ihn Ahmad al-Qazwīnī who wrote it in 551/1156, only a few years before the Persian work was completed (at some time between 1159 and 1162, according to Meisami). The article provides a summary of the contents of Mufīd al-‘ulūm, which has been printed several times but which has never been studied in any detail, and discusses the parallels with and differences from Bahr al-fawā'id.

The muslim judgement against apostates has in recent years been applied in cases of publicly expressed conviction that contradict generally accepted foundations of the Muslim faith. This situation is, however, only the outcome of a theological and legal development in the 5th/11th century. Until that time, the judgement of apostasy (irtidād) could not have been applied against Muslims who voiced opinions that were regarded as unbelief. The rules for this earlier period were written down by al-Shāfi‘ī in his Kitāb al-Umm. His interpretation of the legal institution of istitāba leads to the acknowledgement that the judgement of irtidād is applicable only in a very small number of cases. This reflects legal sensitivity in the period of mass conversions when the secret practice of pre-Islamic religious rites amongst newly converted Muslims might have been widespread. Al-Shāfi‘ī's guidelines, based on earlier judgements within the Kufan tradition, gained widespread acceptance in the Hanafī, Hanbalī, and Shāfi‘ī schools of law. A first change can be noted in the middle of the 5th/11th century when authors such as al-Māwardī and Abū Ya‘lā argued for a less generous application of the istitāba. Two generations later, al-Ghazālī (d. 555/1111) and his contemporaries such as Ibn ‘Aqīl (d. 513/1119) did not restrict the judgement of irtidād to cases of openly declared apostasy. Al-Ghazālī develops a reasoning which is fully aware of the change in law and of the deviation from long-established principles. His own condemnation of three key statements of the falāsifa, expressed in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa, would be impossible without his identification of kufr with irtidād in earlier works.

Among his many studies of Mawsilī metal work, D.S. Rice focuses on a group of five objects produced by a single workshop, that of Ahmad al-Dhakī al-Mawsilī, between 620/1223 and 640/1242. Among them the Cleveland ewer (620/1223) and the Louvre basin made for the Ayyūbid Sultān al-‘Ādil II (636–8/1238–40). One object, only briefly described by Rice and not studied in detail, for Rice did not have access to it at that time, is the ewer of Ibn Jaldak, the subject of this article. The aim of this paper is to revisit the question of origin of the Mawsilī School of metalwork through the close examination of this single object—the Maxsilī ewer now in the Metropolitan Museum (no. 91.1.586) made by Ibn Jaldak in 623/1226. The ewer represents a turning point in the development of Mawsilī metalwork and a key piece to the puzzle. By tracing its origin the article attempts to shed light on the larger question of the origin of the Mawsilī School and its metalworkers.

This paper, which deals with Kamakura New Buddhism, falls into two parts. The first concerns my own model for understanding Kamakura New Buddhism, based upon a critical distinction between two types of Buddhist monk, kansō [symbol ommitted] and tonseisō [symbol ommitted] In the second part, I apply this model to the salvation of women, comparing the different attitudes to the issue taken by the kansō and tonseisō. I introduce my own model in the hope that it will provide a better understanding of Kamakura New Buddhism. Before explaining my own model, however, I offer a survey of research on this topic in particular, the well-known Exoteric-Esoteric model of Kuroda Toshio.

Although the way in which the transitivity alternation is realized differs from language to language, it is common cross-linguistically that a pair of morphologically related verbs participate in the alternation. Korean, an agglutinative language, employs derivational suffixes to indicate alternations in transitivity. On the other hand, there are some verbs used either transitively or intransitively with no addition of suffixes or any alternation of the root verbs, but with the object of the transitive verb the same as the subject of the intransitive. We have named this kind of verb the ‘neutral-verb’ and established some morphosyntactic and semantic criteria for neutral-verbs to distinguish the various pseudo-neutral-verb constructions from true neutral-verb constructions. We have observed the semantic differences between the analytic passives and the intransitive form of neutral-verbs on the one hand, and between the analytic causatives and the transitive form of neutral-verbs on the other.

This paper is a philological study of twelve Sri Lankan medical manuscripts preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Cambridge University Library. It shows the impact of Buddhism on the development of traditional medicine in South Asia and the important role played by South Indian Vaidyas in the propagation of medical knowledge in Sri Lanka. Those Vaidyas appear to have been well versed in Siddha medicine and proficient in both Sinhala and Tamil languages. Only the historical and cultural aspects revealed in these documents are dealt with here. The therapeutic aspect is no less important in view of the large number of medicinal prescriptions, some of which are said to be of proven efficacy. The material presented may be of interest to students of the history of medicine and medical anthropology.