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The article is devoted to the materials found during the excavations of St. George Church located in the southern part of Cyprus, near the village of Softades. In the cultural layers inside of this church, pottery belonging to the Roman period, Iron Age and Late Bronze Age has been discovered. It is discussed in this article.

Prior to the Second World War, Malta appeared vulnerable to fascist influence due to the connections between the Italian Fascist regime and Malta’s irredentist political movement, then led by Nerik Mizzi. In part this Fascist influence was present in cultural propaganda promoting irredentist ideas such as the ‘Mare Nostrum’, which Mizzi and his conservative political party, the Partito Nazionalista, helped propagate. However, previously unseen British documents also reveal significant financial support by the Italian government to Mizzi and his political activities. Mizzi never disclosed this, including the financial support he was granted by Mussolini after having met him personally in Rome on 30 November 1936. Mizzi never openly expounded fascist views, although he consistently supported an irredentist vision of Malta and openly campaigned for Malta to fall under Italy’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile, support for domestic fascist organisations was negligible. At the onset of the War, the Imperial Government started to clamp down on the irredentists, eventually exiling Mizzi and most of his collaborators. The author argues that Mizzi’s dalliance with fascism was not just a convenient relationship for a greater cause, but also a direct acceptance of fascist politics given that making Malta part of Italy’s jurisdiction would also have meant accepting fascist rule.

Transnational Chinese women filmmakers reflect the enormous changes happening in the global film industry as well as political, economic, technological, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the region since the beginning of the millennium. An analysis of Hong Kong writer-director Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna (2007) uncovers how this film explores the divided psyche of a woman torn between “two systems” that model femininity for women in Singapore and Shanghai in the 21st century. Lam’s narrative touches on issues central to the work of many women working across the Chinese-speaking world including migration, labor relations, postcolonial and postsocialist identities, commodification of female bodies in consumer culture, cross-border sexualities, female desire and domesticity.

This paper examines the absence of geminate -rr- in Sanskrit and argues that the synchronic ban on this sequence results from continued high ranking of an Obligatory Contour Principle constraint against heteromorphemic geminates (inherited from PIE) combined with the substrate influence of Dravidian languages in which the rhotics are non-geminable. New -rr- sequences that arose in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Aryan from PIE *-LL- or *-LHL- after loss of the laryngeal and merger of *l with the rhotic were repaired through degemination. This hypothesis predicts a development of PIE *(-)CL̥HLV- to Sanskrit (-)Cī/ūrV- which has not been previously recognized in the treatments of Indic historical phonology. This development is arguably found in mūrá- ‘stupid’ < *mūrra- < *mr̥hx-lo- (cf. Hitt. marlant- ‘stupid’), ūrú- ‘thigh’ < *u̯ūrru- < *(hx)u̯l̥hx-Lu- ← *(hx)u̯l̥hx-Lo- (cf. Hitt. walla- ‘thigh’), śīrá- ‘fervent’ < *śīrrá- < *k̑l̥hx-Ló- (cf. śrā́ya-ti ‘be fervent’), and perhaps in several other examples.

Ethnicity, religion, and geopolitics affect historians’ interpretations of the history of Xinjiang, a very chaotic frontier region of China that did not come fully under the control of the People’s Republic of China until recent decades. The case of Sheng Shicai, an early Republican Era Chinese military officer, shows how professional training and, most importantly, the ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities contributed to his military success in Xinjiang from 1931 to 1934. This paper analyzes the Republic of China’s government documents, Sheng and his acquaintances’ memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources to examine how Sheng applied his military training and employed regional and foreign military forces to win battles in northern Xinjiang. Professional military training helped officers to utilize their resources efficiently and take advantage of their geopolitical situations. Amid numerous talented Chinese military officers, Sheng rose in rank and successfully secured Xinjiang as a part of the Republic of China even when Xinjiang’s geopolitics seemed extremely challenging. This study highlights the value of Sheng’s military prowess, something that the literature has not previously appreciated.

Thirteenth-century sources provide us with striking images of Mongol noblewomen, which are not eclipsed by the heroic conquests and military exploits of their men. While recognising the complexity of gender roles in pre-imperial Mongol society, this article aims to explore the specific responsivities carried by Hö’elün and Börte in the narrative of The Secret History of the Mongols. The selective presentation of their characters and duties further reveals the goal of the Secret Historian to create a ruling model, which includes a brave widowed mother and an intelligent wife for the Qan of the empire.

This essay explores issues of identity and power in twentieth-century scholarship on abortion in the ancient Mediterranean world. I consider how two scholars, John T. Noonan, Jr. and Beverly Wildung Harrison, approach the same ancient Christian sources from different theoretical frameworks: narrative historiography and feminist liberation ethics, respectively. While Noonan’s historical narrative on ancient Christian opposition to abortion demonstrates the “moral supremacy” of Christianity, Harrison’s historical counternarrative reads the ancient sources as borne out of the “sex-negativism” of a minority of ancient Christians. In this analysis I focus on the ways in which the production of history manufactures power by means of authority and legitimacy, particularly for each scholar’s own religious identity and views on the morality of abortion in America. In conclusion, I consider the interests of the respective authors in the production of these histories.

This article presents a translation from the Sindhi oral tradition of bhagat. It originates in Sindh, Pakistan. Today it is practiced by Hindu narrators in post-Partition India. The song translated in this paper focuses upon Bhagat Kanvar Ram, who contemporary bhagat narrators mention frequently. This essay exemplifies his influence on the bhagat tradition in the areas of inspiration, authority, and performance style. It offers a glimpse of the dynamics of the live performances of oral texts.

The article investigates the gender and ritual roles of the Mountain Jewish women of Dagestan. The research is based on fieldwork conducted by the "Sefer" Center in 2018. The author suggests that in the Mountain Jewish communities the central component of ritual life is a collective feast, but not the synagogue as it is in many other Jewish communities. Since traditionally women are responsible for preparing food, they shape and pass on the traditions of the Mountain Jews. They organize community celebrations and rites of passage. During Soviet times, the power over the ritual process transferred from the centralized male system, the synagogue, to the female sphere.

The ante-rhotic vocalic prothesis has been postulated for the history of Hittite, Greek, Armenian, and Albanian—languages, which are often believed to have no inherited PIE words beginning with a rhotic. With the advance of the laryngeal theory, the existence of the ante-rhotic prothesis has been critically revised for Hittite, Greek, and Albanian. However, a closer look at the available evidence leaves one with a wide scale of possibilities of analysis not limited to postulating laryngeals before any PIE initial rhotic. Given that all of the aforementioned branches are primarily localized in Asia Minor or adjacent territories and that they most likely had split from the proto-language at different periods, the hypothesis of the ante-rhotic vocalic prothesis as an aerial feature may prove to be the most economic explanation of facts.

Using the 1980 St. Paul’s riot as a point of departure, this article retrospectively explores migration policymaking in Bristol during the 1950s and 1960s. It charts some of the deliberations, policies and practices of three local actors who played key roles in the city’s debates and developments on migration and integration: the police, charitable, community, religious and voluntary groups and organisations, and the municipality. In doing so, it exposes a complex urban policy arena comprised of varied, multifaceted and ever-changing responses to Commonwealth immigrants, and West Indians in particular. Overall, the article argues that Bristol’s migration policies and practices of the 1950s and 1960s are crucial in light of subsequent increasing inner-city tensions and the 1980 uprising, but also because they broaden our understanding of the pivotal role that cities played in the governance of migration and diversity already during the post-war decades.

This article discusses the career of Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 869/1465), his compilation of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, and the place of this work in Jazūlite Sufism. The teachings of the Jazūliyya Sufi order emphasized intense spiritual devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad as a means of access to the Divine. As a manual of prayers and invocations on behalf of the Prophet, Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt became one of the most popular works of Islamic devotional literature. This widespread popularity was partly due to the Jazūliyya’s doctrinal connections with the Qādiriyya and Shādhiliyya Sufi orders. In Jazūliyya Sufi practice, the recitation of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt and the prayers and litanies of the order were used to instill a “Muḥammadan” consciousness in the mind of the disciple. This higher consciousness was meant to serve as a compass of spiritual guidance for the “true seeker of God” (al-murīd al-ṣādiq), who aspired to the highest levels of Sufi knowledge.

The illustrations of Medina and Mecca in al-Ǧazūlī’s prayer book Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt have drawn the attention of many scholars, who have come up with different interpretations. In the present article, a subgroup within the Maghribī manuscripts of that text is defined for the first time: luxury manuscripts that date from the 11–12th/17–18th centuries and that were mostly produced for important owners, certainly in Morocco, possibly in other parts of the Magrib. The manuscripts in this subgroup have an illustrated and illuminated addition that physically precedes the text of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, but that does not belong to the text of the prayer book. In the present article that addition is for the first time identified as such and described. A small corpus has been assembled and, by way of example, the article contains a detailed description of two manuscripts belonging to that newly defined subgroup: MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arabe 6983, and MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. oct. 240.

Recent discoveries and overlooked documents help us to understand the spread of the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt in a region stretching from the Tatar lands to the Tarim Basin, passing Bukhara and Kokand along the way. This paper by no means aims to provide a historical survey of al-Jazūlī’s prayer book in Central Asia. Rather, I introduce some leads for research on the basis of several manuscripts. A first issue is that of chronology and geography: terminus a quo, terminus ad quem, and the geographical extent of the book’s production and circulation should be revised. A second question regards the circuits of circulation: manuscript designs and illustrations reveal influences from various regions and an evolution in uses. A third lead consists in investigating the education: Sufi training and Qurʾanic institutions such as Dalāʾil-khānas played an important role, while Persian interlinear translations, reading notes in Chaghatay Turkish, and commentaries (sharḥs) suggest a complex reception process.

This paper studies Coptic communal identity in early Islamic Egypt by analyzing two hagiographical narratives from the Christian Copto-Arabic text The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. The narratives relate incidents of sacred images that become ‘aggressive’ when they retaliate against insults. Although the relation between religious violence and sacred art has merited much scholarly attention, the focus is usually on humans as the aggressors and sacred art as the victim. The reverse is scarcer, and its rarity means we miss an opportunity to rethink such narratives as communicative modes of rhetoric to be contextually interpreted. Here I argue that these aggressive sacred images were tools of power within a polemic religious discourse aimed at proclaiming divine truth, undergirding it with supernatural power, and ultimately shaping Coptic communal identity around this discourse.

The vast project to reconstruct a history and geography of the spread of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt necessarily involves looking into the beginnings of the prayerbook’s manuscript transmission. Composed in Morocco before 869/1465, the prayerbook was already known in the Eastern Maghreb from the mid-11th/17th century. It then reached Turkey and the rest of the Mashriq. After that it found its way to Central, South and Southeast Asia. Returning to the core of the book’s diffusion, this article questions the existence of an autograph copy of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt. How was the manuscript tradition of one of the most copied religious books in pre-modern times established? This article also poses essential questions about the work of the actors (copyists, illuminators) responsible for the diffusion of the book in its early days.

The context and purpose of Exod 21:7–11 has been the subject of much debate. One of the most recent treatments is that of Joseph Fleishman, who suggested that the law did not allude to a father selling his daughter, but to giving her in marriage. To that end, he adduced a number of parallels that included several cuneiform legal documents, such as those of Nuzi, in North Iraq. This contribution attempts to assess the weight of those Nuzian parallels.

Copies of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt (Proofs of Good Deeds) by the Moroccan Sufi saint Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 870/1465) were in high demand in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This required producing manuscripts in large numbers and, later, printing the text. These mostly lithographic copies and corpora of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, when combined with references to biographical dictionaries, inheritance records, inventories, library catalogues, and endowment deeds, reveal a great deal of information about the public and private prevalence of the text, within and beyond the empire. The Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt appealed to many individuals, from Ottoman sultans to royal women, and from madrasa students to members of the learned class. Its copies were endowed to mosques and libraries, held in different book collections of the Topkapi palace, and were available from booksellers. Be it silently or aloud, the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt could be read in private homes and in mosques from Istanbul to Medina, a feature of pious soundscapes across the empire.

Illustrated and illuminated manuscripts of the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt from Southeast Asia are an invaluable resource for our understanding of the painting tradition of this region. The many copies now kept in various institutions attest to its popularity, while the lavish treatment often given to manuscripts indicates the high regard local communities had for this text. The types of images featured are similar to those from other parts of the Islamic world, yet these images, as well as the decorative illumination, also reflect local artistic styles. This paper examines a selection of Southeast Asian manuscripts of the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, situating them both within the broader context of manuscript production and usage, and the pietistic landscape of the region.

This is the first of a two-part article that aims at discussing the creation of medical madrasas for Muslims in 7th/13th-century Damascus. This part briefly examines the relationship between medical practitioners and rulers, especially in the Ayyubid period, and studies a number of works written by religious scholars and physicians —often addressed to their patrons—, in which they tackled problems affecting the practice of medicine and its scientific status. I particularly focus on the polemics against pietistic groups who adhered to the doctrine of tawakkul (reliance on God), the emergence of the genre of “prophetic medicine”, and the denunciation of those physicians who impugned the universality of medical principles. This article will provide a wide contextualisation for the discussion of the phenomena that lead to the creation of medical madrasas, which will be analysed in detail in the second part.

This paper is a study of the chapters devoted to women in general and to female figures (female singers) in two encyclopaedic adab works of the Mamluk period, al-Nuwayrī’s Nihāyat al-arab and al-Ibshīhī’s al-Mustaṭraf fī kulli fann al-mustaẓraf. We will analyse the content of these chapters, their focus, the materials from which they are constructed and their objectives within the ensemble of the works. We will also look at the moral and intellectual qualities that configure the portrayal of women in these books, in common with others of adab prose. The final aim of all this is to obtain results to add to those that already exist, with a view to defining the female character types in this literature, the topics that make women visible in it and their relationship with male characters in the stories.

This article analyzes twenty-two petitions, held at the Ottoman Imperial Archives (boa) in Istanbul, submitted to the Council of State Registers (Şūrā-yi Devlet) at the beginning of the twentieth century by the mutawallīs (supervisors) of the Abū Madyan waqf, as well as by residents and representatives of the Maghāriba neighborhood in Jerusalem. These petitions concern the alleged mismanagement of the waqf by the mutawallīs, including the embezzlement of funds and violation of the conditions stipulated in the waqf’s endowment deed (waqfiyya). Through this analysis, the study aims to show how the waqf’s supervisors and the representatives of local political and religious authorities contributed to the confiscation of property, allocated to a waqf, for personal gain or to serve common interests, and, thus to the gradual disintegration of the waqf system in early twentieth-century Jerusalem. It also sheds light on the networks between local citizens (Maghribīs), waqf mutawallīs, local qāḍīs, and the central Ottoman administration and the sultan.

Late Ottoman intellectual Mehmed Akif (1873–1936) was for decades depicted in Turkish public discourse in generic terms as an Islamist radical opposed to the secular nation state. Through Akif’s poetry, articles, translations, correspondence from his exile in Egypt, and biographical detail revealed in the scattered memoirs of students and colleagues, this article offers a reappraisal of his thought as a leading Muslim modernist who adapted the thinking of Egyptian religious scholar Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) to an Ottoman and then Turkish audience in the formulation of an early, prescient compromise between religion and nationalism. The article also notes remarkable similarities between Akif and Indian thinker Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), whom Akif was instrumental in introducing to Arab audiences, and suggests that, once political Islam had later gained currency across all fields of public life, Akif became an alternative to nationalist icon Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) as an intellectual symbol of the republic.

The Middle Assyrian period (1500–1000 BCE) is used to describe the Northern Mesopotamian state, centered around the capital city Aššur (mod. Qalʿat Aš-Širqāṭ, Iraq). In the early years, Aššur was a small urban center of little political importance. However, as the neighboring state of Mitanni/Hanigalbat weakened, the local rulers were able to politically and militarily dominate Northern Mesopotamia. Due to the expanse of this, originally, small state, a strong administration was required to make the governance of the newly conquered regions possible. Over 3,000 cuneiform texts from the Assyrian administration were uncovered, of which 2,000 were from the two capital cities Aššur and Kār-Tukultī-Ninurta. Just as in any ancient state, slaves were a part of society. However, attestations of slaves are relatively uncommon, and most scholarly attention has gone to the related class of deportees and prisoners of war. Nonetheless, administrative documents such as loans provide us with sufficient information on debt and chattel slavery to make a number of observations on (semi) privately owned slaves.

Scientific exegesis has been adapted by religious scholars in this region beginning in the early 20th century, and later developed and is widely accepted by the scholars. The number of scholars who use the exegesis in writing their religious texts particularly in interpreting verses of the Quran have increased throughout the years. Therefore, the objective of this article is to uncover and analyze the progress of the Quranic Scientific Exegesis in South-East Asia through its scholars. This study uses qualitative methodology and library research methods by analyzing various primary and secondary sources. The content analysis method is used to sort and analyze the data with certain characteristics objectively and systematically. The findings of this study clearly show that the prominent scholars in the region such as Shaykh Muhammad Idris Al-Marbawi, Shaykh Muhammad Saʾid ibn Umar, Shaykh Mustafa Abdul Rahman, Shaykh Abdul Hayei Abdul Sukor, Ustaz Zawawi Ahmad, Prof. Hasbi Ash-Shiddieqy, Prof. Buya Hamka, K.H. Bisyri Mustafa, Prof. Achmad Baiquni and Shaykh Ahmad Sonhadji Muhammad, have contributed a lot and played an important role in the development of this the Quranic scientific exegesis. It is also discovered that the government agencies in the region also play a role in supporting the efforts to promote the development of the Quranic scientific exegesis so that it can be accepted and widely used by the Muslim community as a branch of the Quranic interpretation in learning and understanding the Quran.

Malaysia’s partial submission to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf on its extended continental shelf beyond 200 nm limit made in December 2019 sparked a new legal battle of diplomatic notes on the South China Sea (scs) from claimant States (Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Viet Nam) and non-claimant States (Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Indonesia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States). It has greater volume and significance compared to the first exchange of notes in 2009 – 2011. This article examines the impact of diplomatic notes among claimants on the prospect for the peaceful settlement of the maritime disputes in the scs.

There has been some progress in the reconstruction of Proto-Kuki-Chin (PKC), but, due to the previous lack of data from languages reflecting all the Kuki-Chin sub-groups, the available reconstructions merit fresh consideration. On the basis of new data of Kuki-Chin (KC) languages, this paper proposes revisions to some of the reconstructions put forward by VanBik (2009). This paper particularly discusses PKC numerals in detail, especially the reconstruction of the numerals with prefixes.

Between the 1530s and the 1540s, the Emperor Charles V tried to win over the Ottoman Grand Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, leading him to defect from the Ottoman cause and turn him into a faithful Habsburg warlord. In exchange for this, the former would have given the latter the opportunity to rule over the Central Maghreb as a new Habsburg ally. Obviously, both sides managed this negotiation in strict secrecy to prevent the plan from being discovered by the Ottoman sultan. Although it might seem surprising, this kind of diplomatic operation was a common tool to address political rivalries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. While efforts to recruit the best warlords were a well-established practice in Renaissance warfare, inter-religious dialogue was certainly nothing new at the beginning of the sixteenth century, given the long-lasting relations established between Christian and Muslim polities in the Middle Ages. Therefore, by analyzing the three main dimensions of diplomacy—communication, negotiation, and information gathering—this article aims to emphasize that the negotiation between Charles V and Barbarossa was not an exception, but a well rooted diplomatic practice in Habsburg Mediterranean policy.

This article studies two sixteenth-century Asian texts: Khitay namah, a Persian travelogue about the Ming dynasty written by the Muslim merchant Ali Akbar and presented to the Ottoman sultan, and Xiyu, an illustrated Chinese geographical treatise with detailed travel itinerary from China to Istanbul by the Ming scholar-official Ma Li. In addition to demonstrating the breadth of Ottoman and Chinese knowledge about each other in the global Age of Exploration, these two books, written respectively for the monarchs of the self-proclaimed Islamic and Chinese universal empires, reflect the Ottoman and Chinese imperial ideologies in an era when major world powers aggressively vied for larger territories and broader international influence. Both the Ottoman and Chinese authors recast the foreign Other as the familiar Self – Ali Akbar constructed an Islamized China while Ma Li depicted a Sinicized Ottoman world – to justify their countries’ claims to universal sovereignty and plans for imperial expansion. Like many contemporary European colonial writers, Ali Akbar’s and Ma Li’s exploration of foreign societies, their literary glorification of their own culture’s supremacy, and their imposition of their own cultural thinking on foreign lands all served their countries’ colonial enterprise in the global Age of Exploration.

Reviewing the catalogue of the Paṇḍit Collection in the Royal Library at Copenhagen, which was (as far as the colophons allow this conclusion) mainly collected from Western India and from Benares during the 16th through 19th centuries, offers also an opportunity for a preliminary study of some aspects of colophons, particularly the problems incurred in fully understanding the dates and their vocabulary. Moreover, concluding verses attached by copyists at the end of their manuscripts were assembled from the catalogue.

This article pays a particular attention to an Arab army physician and scholar from the mid-19th century who placed empirical science at the center of Islamic thought and situated it within Qurʾānic exegetical debates. He is the Egyptian Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Iskandarānī, a medical officer who ended up working in Ottoman Syria, and whose works were copied and printed (in)directly by the Ottomans. Apart from the limited information contained in previous scholarly literature, which, on the basis of his first commentary alone, repeatedly presents this commentator as one of the first people to have produced a “scientific interpretation of the Qurʾān”, little is known about his personal and professional background and the production of his commentaries. This study also sheds light on exegetical and intellectual directions produced outside Egypt in the 19th century.

This study addresses the views of two Byzantine commentators regarding Targum Onqelos: R. Samuel Roshano of the twelfth century and R. Meyuhas ben Elijah of the thirteenth. R. Samuel explicitly refers to the translation forty-six times; R. Meyuhas makes explicit reference to it 104 times. But there are differences between the two commentators in their relation to the Targum: R. Samuel never mentions the name Onqelos, while R. Meyuhas does so explicitly; R. Samuel systematically cites the text of the Targum, while in most cases in R. Meyuhas’ commentary, there is no accurate citation. The qualitative difference is in their respective relationships with the Targum: all of R. Samuel’s references to it signal his agreement; R. Meyuhas, on the other hand, while frequently agreeing with Onqelos, also brings the Targum as one of two possible alternatives and sometimes openly challenges its interpretation.

Among the Armenian actors who were essential in creating and sustaining Istanbul theaters at the turn of the twentieth century, Eliza Binemeciyan (1890-1981) emerged as a prominent one. In the aftermath of taking part in the play Kösem Sultan in 1912, she became the star of Istanbul theaters for more than a decade until she left her beloved city when she was 35 years old. She never returned to Istanbul, the city that was her home and where the remains of her parents, both well known Armenian actors, were buried. Her story as well as the stories of her Armenian colleagues reveal the decline of cosmopolitanism and the rise of nationalism in Istanbul. The change of scene in Istanbul theaters from multi-lingualism and cosmopolitanism to nationalism was like a microcosm of the policies of Turkification during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. In many memoirs about the era, Eliza Binemeciyan’s departure was normalized since she was depicted as an actor whose absence fostered the acting careers of Muslim Turkish women without much regard for her remarkable presence in Istanbul theaters.

Palestine of the 1920s was a country in transformation. Arabs and Jews were striving to build their separate national communities on the same land amid a bitter rivalry between them, under a recently installed colonial government that had its own geostrategic interests. The mighty earthquake that inflicted death and devastation on the country in July 1927 confronted all of these actors at an early stage of advancing their respective agendas, and presented a serious test to all of them. The article examines the quake’s impact on the Palestinians, the dual Jewish community (Zionist and “old yishuv”), Arab-Jewish relations, and the country’s British imperial administration, and scrutinizes their respective handling of the challenge. Employing the natural disaster as a prism, it sheds a focused light on the dilemmas and choices of these actors at that early phase of Palestine’s mandatory history

This essay seeks to add a further layer to the discussion of associations between ancient Halakhah and that of Beta Israel by examining correlations between halakhic traditions that were preserved among Ethiopian Jewish communities and the Hava Amina mentioned by the Sages. It demonstrates that opinions espoused by the sages’ opponents can be identified within the Hava Amina of the Talmudic discussion. The discussion presents three examples: The use of fire on Shabbat, Kosher slaughtering by someone other than a priest, and the status of an unborn child. The article concludes that the sages were familiar with ancient halakhic traditions parallel to those of the Ethiopian Halakhah, rejected these traditions from the accepted Halakhah, yet preserved traces of them in the Hava Amina of the Talmudic give and take.

This article discerns a change of tendency in the nature of the relations between prophets (“religion”) and rulers (“state”) in the Bible. The examination concentrates on the differences between pre-exilic and post-exilic prophets. The sample survey shows a change of tendency between the two eras. Pre-exilic prophets act as opposition to the government, while Haggai, as a representative of post-exilic prophecy, endorses the heads of the restoration community. This change is rooted in the communal trauma of destruction and exile, as well as in the social, political and theological changes that followed.

This article examines the ways in which Kalimpong, living up to its moniker as a “nest of spies,” was a site where local and international intrigues played out, especially at the local Chinese Chung Hwa School. It examines the period between the 1940s and early 1960s, when Kalimpong, on account of its strategic location, was home to “foreign Kautilyas” of different intelligence services. The Chung Hwa School came to play a part in this game as it provided cover/camouflage for Chinese secret agents. The secret services run by the British colonial state—and later the Indian state—suspected it to be a platform for intelligence gathering. A close reading of the archives uncovers the circuit of suspicion and misgiving surrounding the school. This article analyses these narratives and the ways in which, through the enmeshment of espionage, the Indian Intelligence Bureau, the local Chinese, and “China” were constituted in Kalimpong’s (under)world. The school also emerges as tangled in transnational and international machinations epitomizing People’s Republic of China–Republic of India relations and Guomindang–Chinese Communist Party rivalry.

When compared to its relative success in the Southern and Western parts of Nigeria, Seventh-Day Adventism (S.D.A.) had some difficulties in establishing its mission in the North from the 1930s onward. This paper argues that there were three reasons why S.D.A. missionaries found the North difficult. First, the S.D.A. joined the Christian missionary scene in Nigeria rather late. Second, due to colonial politics, which did not favor the proselytizing aims of Christian missionaries in the North, Adventist missionaries did not find it easy to immediately establish a mission. Third, the difficult beginnings in northern Nigeria can also be attributed to the relationship between S.D.A. missionaries and other mission bodies, which tended towards rivalry, as a result of the “spheres of influence” established by the colonial government.

A Global History of Religion aims to trace connections, controversies, and contingencies in the emergence of “religion” as a global category. Its main intention is to de-center European epistemologies of religion by drawing out a more intricate global and plural genealogy. This is a very complex endeavour, however, especially when one leaves the realm of academic debate and considers the quotidian understandings of “religion” emerging in colonial encounters. Here one is often confronted by vast entanglements of practices, perceptions and politics, which need a historical methodology that foregrounds the plurality, complexity and historicity of all religious epistemes. Drawing on Deleuze’ and Guattari’s philosophical figure of the rhizome, this article sketches such an approach in a conversation between theory and historiographical practice, as it maps out a particular episode in the construction of “political Islam” in German East Africa.

In this essay, I address the longstanding debate on attributing legal texts to formative-period authors by focusing on the transmission of one early text: Ikhtilāf Abī Ḥanīfa wa-Ibn Abī Laylā, attributed to Abū Yūsuf (d. 182/798), and its reception by one early jurist: Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933). I argue that al-Ṭaḥāwī’s written work attests to the existence of multiple independent transmissions of Abū Yūsuf’s text and that these transmissions confirm the attribution of the text to Abū Yūsuf. I then reflect on the formative-period written materials consulted by al-Ṭaḥāwī and his contemporaries, arguing that their access to material from a period in which oral transmission was predominant gave them a unique standing in the eyes of classical-era jurists. Finally, I reflect on the role of digests (mukhtaṣars), particularly those of al-Ṭaḥāwī and al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), in sealing the movement from orality in the formative period to fixed written texts in the classical period.