This study concerns the hermeneutics of the occultation of the twelfth imam through the immense literature of the Shaykhiyya of Kirman (Iran). Generally speaking, the different masters of the Order used two main hermeneutical ‘axioms’: 1) all reality is composed, at least, of two levels: the manifest/exoteric and the hidden/esoteric; 2) the notion of the universe as macrocosm, man as microcosm and the correspondence between them. For this reason, the article is divided into two parts. First, the esoteric aspect of ‘the Occultation in the world’ is an analysis of the principle of the Fourth Pillar (rukn rābi) and its three fundamental components: the ‘invisible’ Friends of the hidden imam, Unicity of the Speaker and Alliance/Dissociation. The second part concerns the esoteric meaning of ‘the Occultation within man’ and examines symbolic and theological hermeneutics, respectively through the work of Sayyid Kāzim Rashtī, the second master of the Order (d. 1259/1843) and the commentaries on the famous hadith ‘Who knows himself, knows his Lord’.

This article reports the discovery by the Hebrew University Expedition to Bet Shean of two unique wall mosaics with Arabic inscriptions under the ruins of the entrance gate to the Umayyad market in the south-eastern part of the excavated city centre. This gate consisted of two stone piers; on the front of each of these was a rectangular decorated stone frame and a mosaic inscription in square Kufic script executed in gilded tesserae on a deep blue background. The first inscription contains four lines of prayer, including the Basmallah and the testimony of al-Shahāda. The lower part of the inscription was not found and it is suggested that the three missing lines contained the quranic verse (IX, 33), most frequently quoted in the Umayyad period. The second inscription consists of seven lines, again starting with the Basmallah formula, and followed by the order given by the Caliph Hishām b. ‘Abd al-Malik (reigned 105–125 A.H./724–743 C.E.) to the governor of jund al-Urdunn Ishāq b. Qabisa to erect this building. The market structure is believed to have been completed in the year 120 A.H./738 C.E. It collapsed eleven years later in the earthquake of 749.

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.

This article explores some important parallels and differences between certain Eastern Christian and Islamic heterodox (Alevi/Kizilbash, Yezidi and Ahl-e Haqq) cosmogonies, which shared and developed old cosmogonic themes such as the ‘primal ocean’ and the ‘earth-diver’-demiurge, and co-existed during the Ottoman period. The investigation reveals that some of the Eastern Christian versions of these cosmogonies have retained their archaic forms, but in most of them the earth-diver is identified with the Devil, a movement towards cosmogonic and religious dualism that could have been effected by both heretical and popular Christian diabology. Conversely, despite the existing traits of dualist and earth-diver cosmogonies in Northern and Central Asian non-Islamic Turkic and related religious traditions, a comparative analysis as demonstrated in this article shows that the Alevi/Kizilbash, Ahl-e Haqq and Yezidi cosmogonies did not absorb or develop these dualist features but rather tried to neutralize them by reinterpreting them in a largely monotheistic framework.

This paper deals with a secret language (kalamo) spoken by the Anakara clan of the Antaimoro tribe in the south-east of Madagascar. According to their own tradition, they migrated to the island between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, from the Arabian peninsula. Their sacred writings (sorabe) are written in Arabic script in a mixture of Malagasy and Arabic. The secret language kalamo contains a large number of Arabic loanwords, as well as Malagasy words that have been coded by various phonological processes. The analysis of the loanwords helps to elucidate the origin of the kalamo, which may contain elements of a pre-existing Arabic pidgin. Their phonetic form shows that the Islamic migrants in Madagascar may indeed have come originally from the Arabian peninsula.

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 is concerned with the textual study of the Sikh scripture, the Adi Granth. Beginning with a survey of previous approaches to the text of the Adi Granth, it argues that the traditional framework that has previously governed such studies is unable to deal with the complexity of the extant manuscript traditions of the bānī (the corpus of compositions in the Granth). In the earliest period, a number of concurrent oral repertoires of the bānī were in existence; over time, the written Adi Granth evolved into a number of relatively standardized recensions. Future textual studies on the Adi Granth must also begin to take into account the ways in which the text was received and read in the pre-modern period. Finally, the field must take cognizance of the contexts within which texts were produced and read, particularly those arising from merchant literacy.

This article examines material that points to the existence in pre-classical Imamism of views on the subject of the imam's knowledge and the related question of sources (usūl) of Imami law, which are at variance with the views attested in the classical sources. The evidence shows that al-Fadl b. Shādhān refuted the possibility of divine inspiration for the imam and maintained that the imam's religious knowledge was based entirely on transmission from the Prophet and restricted to the Quran (a complete and perfect source) and its interpretation. It also provides a strong indication that the doctrine of tahrif and the idea of a ‘complete’ ‘Alid codex had originally served to support the claim that the imams’ teachings were based entirely on the Quran. Other evidence examined here suggests that al-Fadl's views are likely to have been representative of the ‘orthodox’ (viz. the legalist and non-ghuluww) position in early Imamism.

Research to date on the Yuan Dynasty painter Wu Zhen (1280–1354) has concentrated on his paintings, but his poetic inscriptions on paintings have been relatively neglected, even though they are of a high standard. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on Wu Zhen's poetic inscriptions on paintings by his own hand and those of past masters, and argues that inscriptions and colophons are an essential key to understanding Chinese literati art. It examines the literary functions of Wu Zhen's poetic inscriptions, and includes an exploration of the depiction of objects, the narrative, discursive and symbolic aspects, the lyrical qualities, and the expansion of time, space and vision of the paintings, as well as the relationship between the two media, in order to appreciate their wholeness.

Most scholars in Japanese studies (history, linguistics, literature) tend to accept in one form or another the ancient legend that the phonetic writing system of ancient Japan, known as man'yōgana, came from Paekche. This legend about the ancient Korean kingdom—Paekche—appears in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, Japan's two oldest chronicles. To date there have been few attempts to use concrete data from the peninsula either to prove or reject this legend. This article supplies information from all epigraphic data on the Korean peninsula to show that Paekche spread the use of Chinese (sinographs) to be used phonogrammatically and that Koguryo educated the rest of the peninsula in the use of this script.

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.

This article examines the competing theories dealing with the origin of the so-called plural suffix -men in Chinese. Their internal consistency is assessed both diachronically and—in a novel approach—on the conceptual level, that is, with reference to the fundamental value of -men today. As a result, the theses favouring an autochthonous development come out on top, to the detriment of those postulating an exogenous source. -Men is in all likelihood an outcome of the grammaticalization of the notion of ‘clan’, operating on a substratum of ancient Chinese collectives.

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.

Francesca Bray has recently pointed to the neglected role of women in the history of Chinese technology. This article takes up one example, and shows that the work of one woman inventor, whose personal name is unknown but whose family name was Liu, may be securely dated to between 712 and 724. From later descriptions it is also possible to discern that her invention (or just possibly the invention of another craftsperson, which she was able to introduce to court circles) consisted of the bringing together of two carefully carved woodblocks to create a resist for dyeing cloth. Ths in turn suggests that she may well have been familiear with woodblock printing, an invention for which there are also other forms of indirect evidence at about the same time. Since her family was relatively prominent, it may in future be possible to find about more about this inventor from genealogical materials.

In Arabic documents issued by the dīwān of the Norman kings of Sicily during the twelfth century, brutuyūn and istiriyūn mean, respectively, ‘June’ and ‘July’. The geographer al-Idrīsī, who completed the Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq in Palermo in 1154, also uses istiriyūn for ‘July’. These month-names are derived from Greek *Πρωτοϊούνης, literally ‘first June’, i.e. June, and *Ύστεροϊούνης, literally ‘second June’, i.e. July. The linguistic circumstances in which the coining may have occurred are discussed.

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.

In 1782, the year of King Badon's coronation, someone close to the Burmese palace wrote a legal manuscript. This paper gives a translation of and commentary on that section of the manuscript dealing with kingship. By tracing the sources of the material used, it contributes to the debate about the sources of Burmese political philosophy. Was precolonial Burmese political thought primarily Hindu, primarily Buddhist, primarily Indian or none of the above?

Carl A. Trocki's 1999 publication Opium, empire and the global political economy (London: Routledge) is in many ways an important work. His thesis that ‘Without opium there would have been no empire’ is controversial. However, the purpose of this research note is not to refute Trocki's thesis, or indeed to present a new one, but rather to examine Trocki's use of primary documentation, where some difficulties emerge. Not only are some of his East India Company (EIC) documents quoted incorrectly or used out of context, but a limited further study of the same documents sheds some doubt on Trocki's interpretation of the opium trade. Some of the papers quoted even offer intriguing insights into the nature of the EIC's opium monopoly. The issue of opium smuggling (and illicit opium production) within India was ignored by Trocki, although one of his main documents discusses the issue at length. Concern over opium smuggling within India (and by Indians) and its inevitability constituted the main moral basis of the EIC opium monopoly.