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Azerbaijani national identity emerged in post-Persian Russian-ruled East Caucasia at the end of the nineteenth century, and was finally forged during the early Soviet period. After the fiasco of the short-lived independence period of 1918–20, Azerbaijan became Soviet. Soviet power then instrumentalized Azerbaijan for political and ideological penetration into Iran by galvanizing local separatist movements. Azerbaijani Iranology was shaped within Soviet oriental studies and put into service of Azerbaijani nation-building. Exiled Iranian communists found asylum in Baku, joined local research institutions, wrote the first Persian academic and school textbooks, and contributed to the translation of classic Persian poetry into Azerbaijani. Soviet Azerbaijani Iranologists were sent as translators to the Soviet missions to Iran and Afghanistan. After Azerbaijan regained independence in 1991, its Iranological infrastructure was represented by several departments at the National Academy of Sciences and the Iranian Studies Program at Baku State University. While the number of Persian classes at schools during the last three decades diminished, a new generation of post-Soviet Iranologists—those who studied in Iran—emerged. While Soviet Azerbaijani Iranologists never created a solid bilingual dictionary of Persian, several Persian–Azerbaijani and Azerbaijani–Persian dictionaries were published in the 2010s. Post-Soviet Azerbaijani Iranology is still trying to find its place within humanities in the transitional nation.

This paper sheds light on Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī, his scholarly and pietist networks, Sufi genealogy, and its later transmission. Other than his debated role in Najm al-Dīn Kubrā's initiation into Sufism, very little is known on this understudied yet significant Sufi from Khuzistan. The paper argues that Ismāʿīl al-Qasṛī and his western Iranian Sufi genealogy was the primary, rather than secondary, initiatory chain claimed by Kubrā, his associates, and the later heritage. Besides, al-Qasṛī's robe continued to be transmitted beyond Kubrā's Sufi chain, and received multiple names in the absence of a prominent, eponymous master to claim it. Also introducing the figures in al-Qasṛī's, and hence Kubrā's, spiritual genealogy, the paper discovers the overlooked yet decisive impact of Iranian masters, most notably the famous pietist of the Fars area, Abū Isḥāq al-Kāzarūnī, on Sufism in the later tradition.

The essays collected in the volume under review Sufis and Their Opponents in the Persianate World, pay tribute to the memory and legacy of Leonard Lewisohn, a renowned scholar of Sufi history and d...

Fawākah al-Basātin (Fruits of Gardens) is a bilingual Arabic-Persian commonplace book/miscellany written and compiled by Hājj Mirza Mohammad Tehrāni. While transcription was finished in October/Nov...

Writing Self, Writing Empire is an intimate history of Persianate bureaucratic culture in Mughal India told through the eyes of the imperial scribe Chandar Bhan Brahmin. Though Hindu Brahmin scribe...

Following the 1979 victory of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 marked the beginning of an eight-year-long war. One month into the war, Iranian forces lost swa...

Though undisputedly the most famous political figure of medieval Iran, Abu ʿAli al-Hasan b. ʿAli al-Tusi (d. 1092), best known as Nizam al-Mulk and as the author of the celebrated Persian mirror fo...

A photograph of Afghan president Dr. Ashraf Ghani onboard a flight back to Afghanistan was recently tweeted by his spokesperson. Surely, a rather quotidian occurrence in our digital age. Yet, it is...

This book is an ambitious, deeply exciting history of subjectivity in eighteenth-century Persianate South Asia. Keshavmurthy crafts meticulous portraits of three authors: literary historian and bio...

Some of the earliest narratives of meetings between leaders of an Indian community and their Muslim ruler appear in the Vividhatīrthakalpa (Chapters on Many Sacred Places) of the Jain monk Jinaprabhasūri (c. 1261–1333 ce). The text depicts the monk's relationship with Sultan Muḥammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–51) in the years 1328–33, which resulted in the sovereign issuing a number of edicts (farmāns) to protect Jains and Jain temples and which led to the return of a Jina icon (Pkt. paḍima, Skt. pratimā) and the establishment of a Jain quarter in Delhi. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries, Jinaprabhasūri's story would be retold several times, with fifteenth-century narrators shifting his interlocutor to Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 1351–88). In the process of making Jinaprabha an object of memory, Jain authors of both the monk's own and rival monastic orders (gacchas) depicted the sultans as benefactors of the Jain community. While these narratives were attempts to delineate the proper relationship between Jain monastic leaders and Muslim rulers, they also constituted a Jain memory of the Tughluq sultans that is often at odds with modern historical representations of them. Reading these narratives alongside other evidence of Jains’ relations with the Tughluqs offers historians an alternative view of these figures and their relations with their Indian subjects, helping to de-centre modern historical narratives based on selective readings of Persian and Arabic sources and a privileging of Brahmanical or colonial viewpoints of the period. However, these narratives require historians to theorise this ‘memory’ to understand them productively as historical sources.

This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.

This article deals with the iconography of a unique fourteenth-century capital, situated near the one-time tomb of St John of Beverley in the nave of Beverley Minster, Yorkshire. The capital features two hybrid creatures, part animal, part human. Both creatures hold a severed bird’s claw. This article argues that these severed bird’s claws, resembling drinking vessels, are likely to be griffin claws. This interpretation allows for a reappraisal of the meaning of these figures and their use in the church.

This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

It may be possible, now or in the future, for humans to technologically intervene to reduce the amount of suffering experienced by wild animals. There is a debate about whether, if humans can do this, they should. Here, I consider the implications for this debate of the theological claim that humans have been granted dominion over the other animals. I argue that it's more plausible to interpret the dominion claim as granting humans (i) the responsibility to care for the well-being of individual animals than to interpret it as giving humans either (ii) the right to do whatever they want to other animals or (iii) the responsibility to care only for the well-being of aggregates of animals (such as whole species). I then show how this understanding of dominion undermines a range of arguments against intervening to reduce wild animal suffering. These arguments claim that humans do not stand in the right sort of relationship for intervention to be obligatory (or perhaps even permissible). But if we possess such dominion, we do stand in the right sort of relationship for it to be obligatory.

This is a case study of Han Qi (1008–1075), one of the most influential statesmen in the Northern Song. Drawing on his funerary biographical work and other writing, it places at the forefront Han's family life and relationships, especially his role as a brother, uncle, and family head. The goal of the study is threefold: first, to establish Han as a “family man,” in contrast to his conventional image as an outstanding political figure; second, to illustrate how seemingly random occurrences shaped Han's life and fortune in significant ways. Finally, this essay aims to enrich scholarly understanding of family preservation in the Northern Song. For many years, the possibility of the Hans failing in this regard remained a source of anxiety for Han Qi. This fear shaped his interaction with members of the younger generations in tangible ways and created noticeable undertones in his writing on family matters.

From Basketmaker II to Pueblo II (200 BC–AD 1150), turkey husbandry flourished among Ancestral Pueblos inhabiting the northern and southern San Juan areas (300 BC–AD 1250) and the Rio Grande Valley (AD 1250– 1700) due to the ritual-symbolic importance of turkey feathers to rainmaking ideology. As primary caregivers, Ancestral Puebloan women's long-lasting social bond with domesticated turkeys was disrupted by Spanish maize and textile tribute (encomienda) systems and demands on Native labor (repartimiento) of the mid-1600s, a major factor contributing to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Despite the Spanish assault on their culture, Native people clandestinely practiced kachina religion by reusing turkey feather ceremonial objects, seeking refuge in ancestral mesa-top villages, and repurposing Spanish ecclesiastical materials as part of a pan-Pueblo resistance and revitalization movement. This study examines a previously overlooked form of Native resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts—“turkey girl” tales that appropriated and repurposed a Spanish religious folktale. Evidence suggests that these tales were authored by Pueblo Revolt–era war captains who attended Franciscan mission schools around the 1630s. To varying degrees, these “turkey girl” tales express nativist resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts, commitment to revitalization ideology, and pan-Pueblo ethnogenesis.

The principle that church buildings constitute sacred spaces, set apart from the secular world and its laws, is one of the most enduring legacies of medieval Christianity in the present day. When and how church buildings came to be defined as sacred has consequently received a good deal of attention from modern scholars. What happened when that status was compromised, and ecclesiastical spaces were polluted by acts of violence, like the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral? This paper investigates the history of rites for the reconciliation of holy places violated by the shedding of blood, homicide or other public acts of ‘filthiness’ which followed instances such as Becket's murder. I first identify the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in England as crucial to the development of this rite, before asking why English bishops began to pay attention to rites of reconciliation in the years around 1000 ce. This paper thus offers a fresh perspective on current understandings of ecclesiastical responses to violence in these years, the history of which has long been dominated by monastic evidence from west Frankia and Flanders. At the same time, it reveals the potential of liturgical rites to offer new insights into medieval society.

Historiographical production within twelfth-century Puglia seems to have been markedly limited, and this frustrates attempts to access internal perspectives on a region which played a pivotal socio-political and economic role within southern Italy as it fell under Norman rule, and was subsequently absorbed into the new Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. It might, however, be possible to bolster the region's twelfth-century historiographical outputs if we were to include a largely overlooked and problematic source, the so-called Fragmentary Troia Chronicle. It is a short, hybridized and fragmented Latin text usually assumed to be late twelfth-century as a result of its chronological coverage. It consists of an annalistic-style account of political and religious events mostly of relevance to the northern Pugliese city of Troia and its bishopric, and ostensibly covers 1014 to 1124/7. It is accompanied by what also seems to be an appendix of documents (some dated later than the annalistic section) associated with the city's bishopric. This article therefore offers the first extended analysis of the Troia Chronicle's place within Pugliese historiographical production. It revisits questions around its authenticity, examines potential contexts surrounding its production and content, and provides the first English translation of the narrative section of the chronicle. In so doing, it argues that we must tread carefully when using this source, but that the Troia Chronicle's existence and its main chronological focus could at the very least hold significance as a marker of an enduring remembrance of a vibrant era of episcopal, literary and urban development in this Pugliese city in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The twin birth of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention in 1948 have received enormous scholarly attention in recent years. Yet historians have largely ignored how these legal projects intersected with that year’s war in Israel/Palestine. In this article, I push these two stories back into a single frame by examining the year-long efforts of one early human rights organization, the World Jewish Congress, to advance rights-claims on behalf of Middle Eastern Jewish communities imperiled by the regional repercussions of the war. The WJC’s record of activities affords us a direct window into contemporaneous activist understandings of the ties between the Holocaust and the Nakba, human rights and genocide, and international law and politics. More broadly, it reveals the intrinsic limits of early human rights advocacy in an emerging global system exclusively structured around nation states.

Though it has long been the residence of choice for Manhattan's rich, the co-operative apartment building has an intellectual lineage that originates in pre-Marxian communitarian socialism. In the early nineteenth century, radical philosophers Charles Fourier and Robert Owen first theorized a multifamily dwelling owned in joint stock by its residents that could deliver economies of scale in the production and delivery of household necessities. Using previously untranslated French sources and archival material (New Harmony Working Men's Institute), this article demonstrates how early socialist ideas about housing, domestic labour and ownership evolved into the idea for the New York City co-operative apartment building.

The Eastern Frontier consists of seven chapters, preceded by a list of abbreviations (p. viii), list of maps (p. ix), acknowledgements (pp. x–xi), introduction (pp. 1–15), and followed by conclusio...

The inaugural book in Oneworld Publications’ series on the Radical Histories of the Middle East is a monograph on the life and legacy of the mid-twentieth century Iranian socialist Khalil Maleki (1...

By the end of the nineteenth century tens of thousands Shiʿa Iranians were taken captive by Sunni Turkmen and Kazakh slave raiders and enslaved in the cities and steppes of Central Asia. Slave-raid...

Farvi, also known as Farrokhi, is an Iranian language spoken in the village of Farvi in Khur district of Kavir desert in central Iran. It shares features with other languages in Kavir region such as Khuri, Irāji and Garmayi. This paper describes synchronic and historical phonology and the grammar of Farvi based on data collected in Farvi village during April 2019. The study of historical phonology and morphological evidence show that though basically Northwestern, Farvi shares some features with Southwestern Iranian languages so that, like Kurdish and Balochi, it is separated from the other Northwestern Iranian languages. In later changes, Farvi shows some areal features that put it alongside Southeastern languages such as Northern Bashgardi and Balochi.

This article revisits the origins of the Alexander Mosaic at Pompeii by focusing on the figure standing at Alexander's right hand. The starting point is Andreas Rumpf's suggestion that this “right-hand man” may be the patron of the original painting, who wished to advertise his own role in the represented battle. It is argued that Ptolemy I is perhaps the strongest candidate on historical grounds, and that interesting connections can be drawn between the mosaic and the historian Kleitarchos, who worked at the Ptolemaic court. Circumstantial support for a Ptolemaic connection is supplied by other finds from the House of the Faun, three of which are briefly re-examined.

The Western Christian Presence in the Russias and Qajar Persia is by all accounts a monumental work; in its heft, with almost 1,000 pages of sprawling text; in the depth of its research, with some ...

This article calls for a new understanding of the relationship between classicizing and Christian discourses of exemplarity through a close reading of the figure of Scipio Nasica in Livy, Ab urbe condita Book 29 and Augustine, De ciuitate Dei Books 1–2. Nasica, whose selection as a uir optimus by the Senate in 204 b.c.e. has puzzled modern scholars, was a source of historiographical difficulty for Livy that prompted him to reflect upon exemplarity, mythmaking and the tenuous relationship between past and present. For Augustine, on the other hand, Nasica was a pagan, and thus imperfect, realization of Christian pietas and restraint from luxurious behaviour. Although differing in their interpretations of the Republican exemplum, both Livy and Augustine point to the complexities inherent in invocations of paradigmatic Roman maiores. The close study of Scipio Nasica thus reveals the classicizing precedent lingering behind the supposedly ‘Christian’ rejections of pre-Christian Roman culture in the De ciuitate Dei.

In April 1982, Great Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. On 14 June, the defeated Argentine military began the evacuation of the Islands. Most Argentines came to view this short war as an absurd adventure entered into by a military dictatorship in decline trying to cling on to power. Yet by analysing Argentine songs about the Malvinas from 1941 to 1982, this article shows that the national imaginary had long included ideas of sovereignty usurped and captive islands awaiting redemption. Argentine songs about the Malvinas, I maintain, can be analysed as expressions of an ‘emotional community’ around the Islands. By examining the emphases, constants and changes in the songs emerging from that community, we get a clearer picture of how ideas about the territory and its recovery changed over time.

Concerning culture and Islam, Western scholars were inclined to present these two countries as least Arabicised, and, especially in Indonesian studies, much emphasis has been given to portraying nominal Muslims, the so-called abangan;I will comment on the ‘myth of the abangan’ later. [...]scholarship has tended to revolve around the tracing of religious and cultural influences that entered and shaped Indonesia and Malaysia from the outside, especially from the Arab world. [...]the respectable position of the Haramayn has been in decline for the last few decades. Nowadays, other places in the Middle East, or elsewhere in the Muslim world, have come to assert their influence and, in turn, have left their impact on Muslim discourse in the Malay-Indonesian region. [...]since the 1980s, the discourse developed by such scholars as Abu al-A'la al-Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani and Middle Eastern movements like al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (and its splinter groups), Hizb al-Tahrir and the like have begun to find their way into Southeast Asia. According to Indonesian law

This article examines the intersection between extraterritoriality--privileges afforded to European subjects in the Islamic Mediterranean--and various forms of state membership. To capture the multiplicity and instability of state membership, I introduce the phrase “legal belonging”--a neutral, umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of bonds between individuals and states (usually referred to as subjecthood, nationality, or citizenship). Adopting the methods of global legal history, I look at how laws regulating legal belonging responded to the extraterritorial context of the Mediterranean in both European and Middle Eastern states. In so doing, I offer an alternative to the centrifugal narrative of modernization, which presumes that modern citizenship was invented in Europe and then exported to the Islamic world. Instead, I contend that the evolution of legal belonging on both sides of the Mediterranean developed in response to the challenges and opportunities presented by extraterritoriality. The article consists of two cases studies: first, I look at the regulation of legal belonging in Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco, arguing that this legislation responded to the challenges posed by extraterritoriality. Second, I examine the influence of extraterritorial regimes on the nationality of Algerians under French colonial rule.

Although designed primarily as a national institution, between the 1880s and the First World War the Italian army's military operations were all in the colonial sphere. By 1914, Italy claimed an extensive empire in East and North Africa. How far did imperialism shape Italian military culture and institutions? I identify ‘imperial thinking’ across nine areas of army activity. Italian colonialism relied on a pervasive narrative of Italian benevolence – italiani brava gente – with Italian conduct in war or as imperial rulers portrayed as inherently mild. This was accompanied by a set of anxieties we might term Adwa syndrome: after Italy's defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896, the Italian army was acutely afraid of possible violent uprisings by the local people. Many army officers expected betrayal and brutality from their colonial enemies or subjects, and acted accordingly. This outlook shaped the army's conduct both in the colonies and when dealing with European adversaries in the First World War. While the army of late Liberal Italy was structurally and doctrinally a national army, it was increasingly imperialist in mindset and outlook, which directly affected its conduct on and off the battlefield.

The discovery of low stone tables at Magdala and a few other sites in the Galilee and Golan allows us to examine, for the first time, this liturgical piece of furniture used by several communities in the late Second Temple period and the first centuries of the Common Era. This article defines the purpose of these stone tables based on analysis of the archaeological finds and examination of the literary sources associated with the Torah-reading ceremony conducted in the synagogues of ancient Palestine. The reading of the Torah throughout this long period was conducted standing with the open Torah scroll held in raised hands. Our study demonstrates that this table was not intended to be used for reading the Torah, but rather functioned as a low stand upon which the scroll was placed before the Torah-reading ceremony, during the breaks between the readers, and after completion of the ceremony.

For over two decades, historians of the early modern world have been charting the practices, principles, and ideologies of the “Republic of Letters,” an intellectual community forged via paper, not place. Few, however, have ever ventured to consider America's place in this scholarly republic. This article charts in new detail the aspirations—and shortcomings—of eighteenth-century American efforts to participate in a truly transnational, intellectual community. Focusing on the life of Ezra Stiles (1727–95), it will dig into hundreds of unpublished, untranslated manuscripts, as well as scores of overlooked early modern periodicals and publications. What emerges is a glimpse into how Stiles especially strove to place America on the intellectual map of the early modern world. Stiles's plan was to lay the academic groundwork for his new nation by forging connections between universities and promoting a unified intellectual front to the Republic of Letters abroad. In one sense, this vision was remarkably shrewd, standing out as one of the first efforts to connect colonial universities. On the personal level, however, this (over)emphasis on institutions came at a cost. Too preoccupied with the colonial American universities and too little focused on publication, Stiles would ultimately struggle to be recognized as a citizen of the scholarly republic.

In Qin and Han times, the establishment of a complex legal system that applied to every member of the empire brought about an unprecedented transformation of the husband–wife relationship, changing it from a bond largely determined by custom, ritual, and family concerns to one regulated by law. Laws recorded in the Zhangjiashan bamboo legal texts reveal that women's legal status in Qin and Han times was far higher and allowed for greater autonomy than previously imagined. Their increased legal standing may be traced to reduced household size, a policy set to counteract the mounting death toll and social chaos that followed Qin expansion and the transition from Qin to Han rule. I analyze exemplary cases to demonstrate how the small family system in conjunction with a legal order that empowered women as household heads created a new space for widows and wives to exercise their autonomy.

This paper investigates the mobilisation of the Hungarian Red Army in 1919 by the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. It challenges the literature's existing interpretations, explaining the successful mobilisation of the regime with its ‘nationalist’ or ‘Bolshevik’ character. First, the paper examines the military policy of the regime, arguing that it was not a mere copy of the Russian communist model but was a unique combination of social-democratic and communist ideas. Second, it analyses the recruitment propaganda and demonstrates how it combined dogmatic Bolshevism with traditional elements of the wartime propaganda. Third, it investigates the methods used by the Hungarian Soviet Republic to mobilise the population both in Budapest and in the rural eastern countryside. It argues that the mobilisation was possible through the involvement of civil associations (mostly the trade unions) and the incorporation of the former Habsburg regiments in the new Red Army.

A fragmentary large chlorite vessel of the Halil Rud valley civilization (Kerman, Iran, mid third millennium bc), found in unknown circumstances and recently recovered by the police forces of Iran, is discussed in the wider scenario of coeval animal iconographies of middle and southwest Asia. Beginning from the imagery carved in the two superimposed friezes of the reassembled fragments, we review the different theoretical approaches in interpretation of similar animal iconography. The figuration of the vessel is interpreted as a scene of the scavenging of bovine carcasses by three different animal actors: lions and birds of prey/vultures, but also hyenas—a subject previously unknown in the art of the reference regions. Following a review of the interrelations of these species in scavenging and with humans, particularly in the coeval context of domestic animal exploitation and developing urban settlement, we investigate the potential semantic implications of the iconography in terms of the symbolism and ideology in the social context.

This paper discusses the significance of a fragment of stone sculpture built into the north wall of the churchyard at Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight. The sculpture depicts an open right hand that is larger than life-sized and is probably of late Anglo-Saxon date. The size and character of the sculpture favours a manus dei (hand of God), forming the upper element of a large rood assemblage. The authors consider allied sculpture in which such a hand appears on Anglo-Saxon grave markers and in similar low relief depictions where Christ is figured on the Cross. At Carisbrooke, this architectural sculpture would have formed a significant feature of an Anglo-Saxon minster church that was rebuilt in the early Norman period. The siting of this building and the extent of its parochia is briefly considered. Supplementary material reviews the probable significance of the sculptural use of Quarr stone at Carisbrooke and elsewhere.

This article offers an overview of specific aspects of the material culture of Pomerelian minor towns in the late Middle Ages. Although small urban centres in Pomerelia (also known as Gdańsk Pomerania) were located off the main trade routes and in the hinterland of the Hanseatic world, archaeological excavations have revealed numerous remains related to the Hanseatic way of life. The analysis of buildings, pottery, glassware, and metalware reveal the Baltic towns’ participation in urban culture, providing an insight into the status of the smaller towns in relation to the main trade centres of the Baltic Sea.