This article analyses the collapse of the Mongol empire in the mid- to late fourteenth century (1330s to 1390s) across Eurasia, looking at three facets of the Crisis: environmental—focusing on climate change; epidemiological—exploring the Black Death's impact on the fall of the Chinggisids; and political—mainly the dilution of the Chinggisid charisma due to the halt of expansion. We argue that the main facet of the Crisis was political, and that it derived from the nomadic culture of the Mongols. This was the same political culture that enabled them to establish their huge empire. However, an integral part of this political culture was the need to secure the support of the nomadic elites who were also the backbone of the Mongol army. This proved to be much harder in a reality of excessive natural disasters on the one hand and the erosion of the Chinggisid charisma due to the renunciation of the ideal of world conquest on the other. The result was a growing number of elite groups who contested for power while nominally retaining the framework of the Chinggisid principle, among whom the imperial sons-in-law played a significant part, as well as the shrink and fragmentation of the Chinggisid polities that survived the Crisis.

An Arabic-language tract crafted in in Makhachkala in 1949 offered an abrasive critique of ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī (1878–1943), ostensibly the father of the Dagestani modernist milieu (al-firqa al-jadidiyya). Who was ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī, what was his oeuvre, and why did the most prominent ulama of Dagestan despise him to the extent of publishing an original pamphlet cursing his legacy? In this article we set out to answer these questions and attempt to show that at the beginning of the Soviet century, the North Caucasus represented an important conduit for the circulation and further refinement of Islamic scholarship. We contend that the absorption and reproduction of modernist thinking among Dagestani ulama was not halted by the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ takeover. Indeed, we set out to show that in the North Caucasus between the 1920s and the 1960s, scholars continued to cultivate interest in Islamic jurisprudence, in fact unencumbered by the secularist policies adopted by the Soviet state. As we shall see, in this environment ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī morphed into what could be termed an epic figure and became so popular as to personify either the virtues or the evil aspects of modernist Islam.

This article examines historical perceptions of the territorial extent of Bod, the Tibetan toponym for ‘Tibet’. In a bid to establish what area second-millennium authors (and audiences) may have pictured when this toponym was invoked, we analyse instructive passages from five historiographical works, mostly dating from between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The rough-hewn maps of Bod ‘Tibet’ that emerge from this procedure differ quite radically from one work to the next, and at times even between different passages from a single source. While one work may see ‘Tibet’ as the territory directly centered on the Tibetan Plateau’s south-central river valleys, another source may forward an image of a ‘Tibet’ that is thrice as large. Works may also allow for shifts in its borders from one political period to the next, or incorporate multiple incongruous territorial descriptions. This material helps answer what ‘Tibet’ meant in different periods and places, and to different people—questions that have only poorly been studied outside of modern political history. One relevant finding, among others, is that the notion of a ‘Tibet’ that covers a large part of the Tibetan Plateau, incorporating for instance sites in contemporary eastern Qinghai, was not in fact a modern innovation.

One profound yet relatively understudied contribution to tafsīr (Qur’an commentary) is that of Ibn ʿArafah al-Warġammī (d. 803/1401), a leading Mālikī scholar of eighth/fourteenth-century Ḥafṣid Tunisia. Although no separate commentary by Ibn ʿArafah has come down to us, his commentary on the Qur’an is accessible through the lecture notes that were compiled by his students. This article will examine one significant aspect of Ibn ʿArafah’s Qur’anic discourse that is barely acknowledged—his understanding of the relationship between the Qur’an and logic, and his use of logic in Qur’anic interpretation. It suggests that Ibn ʿArafah conceived of logic as embedded in the fabric of the Qur’an and felt a sense of urgency in using logic as an instrument for tafsīr. It also shows that the application of logic to Qur’anic interpretation is dominant in Ibn ʿArafah’s commentary to an extent that is not found in earlier works of tafsīr. Through identifying the different ways in which he intertwined the science of logic with tafsīr, this article will highlight Ibn ʿArafah’s role in the logical hermeneutics of the Qur’an and expand our understanding of how logic was used as an instrument for other sciences—in particular, for the interpretation of the Qur’an.

In 1804, an elder courtier named Ban’deyri Hasan Manikufaanu (1745–1807) chronicled the sea voyage of the sovereign of the Maldives, Sultan Muhammad Mueenuddeen I (r. 1799–1835). The purpose of the voyage was to visit the islands of Ari Atoll. Manikufaanu crafted 171 verses according to the rules of a Maldivian genre of poetry called raivaru. The work is known as Dhivehi Arumaadhu Raivaru (‘Raivaru that chronicled the journey of the Maldivian royal fleet’). In this article, I demonstrate how the verses provide a lens into early nineteenth-century Maldivian boat construction, court music, navigational routes, regnal travel, royal ensigns, sailing, and seamanship, all of which have not been sufficiently explored in Indian Ocean studies. In contrast to scholarship on travelogues that emphasises Muslim men’s experiences of heterotopia when they travelled across the Indian Ocean on steamships to maritime ports, this article centres on a provincial journey of a royal fleet of sailing ships taken by the sultan of the Maldives and other noblemen to visit Maldivian commonfolk who lived on islands that formed part of an atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

In the mid-fourteenth century, the Jochid ulus went through a phase of extreme political turbulence. Following the death of the last Batuid khan Berdibek (r. 1357–1359), during the next two decades, circa 1360–1380, a high number of power contenders rose at both the central and the local levels of the ulus. This article aims to map and exemplify those attempts as part of the broader theoretical discussion concerning the scope and depth of the khanate's crisis. It does so by combining an overall, bird's-eye perspective on the political history of the ulus by zooming in on the regional history, as well as through the analysis of both written primary and numismatic sources. None of the multiple patterns of reaction to the dying-out of the Batuid lineage clearly contradicted the idea of the khanate's unity and the overarching ‘Chinggisid principle’. At this point in time, the ulus still followed the centrifugal logic of the Chinggisid rule. At the same time, the crisis of the Jochid ulus of the mid-fourteenth century indeed prepared the very ground for the power division between the still-existing branches of the Jochid family and the break-up of the Jochid power domain of the fifteenth century that followed the last unification attempt of the ulus under Toqtamïsh (r. 1380–1406).

To the limited materials available for the study of the early Muslim tradition of renunciant piety (zuhd) may now be added the papyrus P.Vindob. AP 1854a–b of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, which is edited, translated, and annotated in this article. Its two incomplete and damaged leaves contain four texts that constitute a small anthology of meditations on the imminence of death and judgment: psalms 7–13 of the Islamic ‘Psalms of David’ (Zabūr Dāwūd); a collection of narratives surrounding the death of the Prophet Muḥammad; a collection of material about grief over the deaths of the Prophet and Fāṭima and over the slaughter of al-Ḥusayn's party at Karbala; and a dialogue between God and the prophet David about the rewards of the afterlife. The papyrus confirms that the long Muslim tradition of rewriting the ‘Psalms of David’ originated in early renunciant circles. It also illustrates the process whereby a ninth-century preacher could compile a notebook of sermon material from a wide range of sources, including poetry, hadith, and an apocryphal scripture. It also shows how much the still-underdeveloped study of early Islamic piety stands to benefit from the even less-studied resource of Arabic literary papyri.

This article enquires into pseudonymous Persian texts in South Asia as devices to domesticate non-Muslim technical knowledge and to legitimate the status of a Muslim professional group that emerged from interaction with the Indian natural and social environment. In the Risāla-yi kursī-nāma-yi mahāwat-garī—an illustrated text on the elephant and the elephant keeper, claimed to be authored by one of Noah’s grandsons—the aforementioned profession (acquired from Indian society) is Islamised by making it congruent with the Muslim view of scientific and technical professions as practices dating back to the prophets of Islam. The Kursī-nāma is examined from the perspective of the function of the pseudonymous text and of how its social context shaped the expected function. What does this form of writing tell us, whether deliberately or not, about its hidden authors and their environment? The fictional narrative of the Kursī-nāma is a stratagem that grants new canonicity to a critical subject. From being cursed in the Qur’an, mahout became a respectable occupation in Mughal India due to its close association with royal power. In the Kursī-nāma, the creation of a sacred genealogical tree (kursī-nāma) of the profession and an Islamic ritual associated with it were meant to control and claim authority within both the groups of mahouts and their social environment. From this point of view, the Kursī-nāma constitutes a unique source for investigating the ascension of a professional group and its search for social legitimation.

To this day, Wajid ‘Ali Shah (1822–1887), the last nawab of Awadh, is remembered either as a hedonist and political failure who was forced to surrender his kingdom to the British East India Company or as a musical genius and important patron of the arts. However, few accounts engage with his personal religiosity and public acts of Shī’ah piety. This article examines Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own scholarship and poetry, and considers his mourning practices and investment in rites relating to Muharram. By focusing on the era of his exile in Calcutta (1856–1887), I explore how these rituals integrated the nawab into the public life of the city. More broadly, this article considers his court’s activities as a case study to explore the history of nineteenth-century Shī’ah sound art practices and examine how instrumentation, oratory, and processions were understood by contemporary Muslim scholars of religion, the arts, and music.

This study investigates the importance of interregional mobility along the Eastern Silk Roads during the Mongol period, highlighting the interconnectedness of postal and pilgrim networks in eastern Central Asia, with a particular focus on mid-fourteenth-century changes in the multifaceted dynamics of overland mobility under Mongol rule. By referencing an extensive corpus of Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian administrative texts, as well as pilgrim inscriptions, the research provides a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the Mongol administration and the postal system within it, and how they were connected with pilgrim activities. The article uncovers valuable insights into how mobility patterns changed over time. Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of the geographical aspects of these networks reveals enduring links between the Eastern Tianshan Region and the Gansu Corridor, whilst also underlining the expansion of pilgrim networks during the Mongol period. The research also explores the societal implications of these mobility networks, highlighting the importance of religious affiliation and social status in overland mobility. This comprehensive analysis illuminates the Eastern Silk Roads and presents a unique perspective on the interplay of political, religious, and socio-economic factors that shaped the history of the region during Mongol rule.

This article traces how the Yemeni-origin Sufi order of Ṭarīqa ʿAlawiyya and its ritual litany of al-Ḥaddād, with chants and prayers for the Prophet and his descendants especially from Hadramawt, became part of everyday Muslim devotional practices in Malabar through immigrant networks of Hadrami Sayyids. Competing, sometimes rivalling, and appropriating other Sufi religiosities, the Alawi order meaningfully involved within the theo-legal Sufi discourses that have been remoulding the Sufi cosmopolis in the Indian Ocean. By focusing on two notable early immigrant Sayyids in Malabar, this article argues that the successful placement of the ʿAlawī order within the Sufi cosmopolis and the permeation of the ritual was a complex socio-religious project that was brought forth by various aspects of the sacred genealogy, Alawi Sufi writings, Sufi activism, and the effective utilisation of Hadrami immigrant networks.

‘Swaraj’ is perhaps the most widely known of the keywords that are associated with Indian nationalism. Although it was initially used to translate the Western concept of ‘self-government’, by the second decade of the twentieth century, swaraj had become a complex term that could not be readily translated by using English expressions. Intellectual historians have extensively analysed the use of swaraj in the Gandhian oeuvre. Gandhi's Hind Swaraj has often been taken as a guide to explain the meaning of the term. However, the prior history of swaraj and the uses of swaraj by politicians who disagreed with Gandhi's definition of that term have not been adequately explored. To fill this lacuna, in this article, a selection of instances are examined that marked the transformation of swaraj from a traditional term that was associated with the precolonial Maratha history to an untranslatable term that was used by Indian nationalists to conceptualise their anti-colonial activism. I demonstrate here that swaraj was left untranslated in a range of English-language Indian political texts and documents to shape an agenda that was opposed to the collaborationist policies of imperial liberalism. The article thus illustrates the crucial role that the question of untranslatability played in sustaining the anti-colonial agenda of mainstream Indian nationalism.

This article examines the intertwined history of local divination schools and divination instructors during the Yuan–Ming transition through a microhistory of the Zhu family—a diviner family who, as newcomers to Suzhou, carefully navigated the turbulent dynastic transition. Based on broader prosopographical research of Yuan and Ming divination school instructors, this study draws two main conclusions regarding social and institutional history during this crisis period. First, the Zhu family, representing lesser elites whose status depended on state institutions, survived the Yuan–Ming transition by building local networks, transforming their expertise, and manipulating narratives of their family history. Second, despite the Ming founder's order for the re-establishment of local divination schools, it was the diviner families, seeking to recover from the dynastic transition, who played a key role in restoring the local institution. This study extends our understanding of the scope of the fourteenth-century crisis, its diverse manifestations across social groups, and the manipulation of crisis narratives for various purposes. It also proposes a bottom-up approach to engage with the Yuan–Ming social and institutional continuity and rupture.

The shuhūr sanah, also called the Shuhur era, was a solar calendar used in Deccan India in the pre-modern and early modern periods. Scholars have long assumed that the calendar was instituted in the early fourteenth century, sometime in 1344–1345 CE, although, to date, no primary evidence from the fourteenth century has been examined to substantiate this inaugural date or explain the circumstances that led to the genesis of the calendar. In the present article, I discuss a 1333–1334 CE Persian epigraph from Daulatabad that uses the phrase shuhūr sanah and argue that the calendar was instituted during a period of economic, administrative, and agricultural uncertainty in the reign of the Delhi Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325–1351). In so doing, I re-date the inauguration of the calendar to a decade prior to what has been assumed thus far and posit a new theory about the calendar’s longevity in the Deccan. More broadly, I examine the historiography and the historical usage of the Shuhur era in the Persianate epigraphic corpus. The survey reveals how the Shuhur era was used to make public-facing pronouncements and also clarifies the limits of the calendar’s usage. The calendar was popular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; after this period, it was phased out by other calendrical systems preferred by the Mughal (1526–1857) and the Maratha (1674–1818) empires, who came to control the Deccan.

The fragmentation of the Ilkhanate (1258–1335) midway through the fourteenth century coincided with the publication of several verse histories that were based upon the Blessed History (Tārīkh-i Mubārak) of Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī (d. 1318). Seen by many as lacking originality, these texts have often been treated as a new form of literary expression rather than a source of information about key episodes in Ilkhanid history. While it may be true that the verse histories are largely reliant on other sources for information about events that occurred before their time, the choice of what to copy and how it was presented reveals a great deal about changing attitudes to power, religion, and class as the Hülegüid Dynasty weakened and new power brokers appeared. This article will analyse how four verse histories—the Shāhnāmah-yi Chingīzī of Shams al-Dīn Kāshānī (1312–1316), the Ẓafarnāmah of Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī (1335), the Shāhanshāhnāmah of Aḥmad Tabrīzī (1337), and the Ghāzānnāmah of Nūrī Azhdarī (1361)—reproduced the biography of the prominent Ilkhanid commander, Amīr Nawrūz (d. 1297), to gauge how changing circumstances influenced their view of the past. It will be shown that, although these stories may not offer much in the way of new information about Nawrūz, they do show how writers attempted to reshape their narratives to reinforce values of piety, justice, and loyalty during the Chinggisid crisis of the fourteenth century.

Japan's Kobe City Museum holds a unique yet overlooked xylographic print of an early seventeenth-century composition that centres on a Chinese-language world map, mounted as a scroll. At first glance, the scroll seems to contain a copy of a well-known composition attributed to the Jesuit Giulio Aleni that is extant at two Italian libraries. It is known in the literature as Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, after the title of only one of three constitutive parts. Detailed comparison shows that the hitherto unstudied Kobe sheet is significantly older. This observation initiates a discussion of the contents and materiality of the Kobe sheet in three steps. First, a reconstruction of intertextual connections to late Ming books based on the introductory text illustrates the function of the sheet map. Second, the origins of the maps proper are investigated, which, unlike the introductory text, can be traced back to a collaborative book project. In a last step, the afterlife of these map sheets is discussed, further illuminating the genealogy of maps that facilitated the production of the Kobe sheet. Throughout, this article highlights the local co-creation of map artefacts and the necessity to study maps in context, beyond the analysis of their cartographic contents.

Evidence shows that tenth- and eleventh-century Kitan (Liao) emperors used pseudo-kinship to cement diplomatic relations with foreign powers as well as for internal affairs. Similarities between this practice and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Mongol anda (sworn friendship) were previously highlighted by Wang Guowei but have yet to be the focus of further study. Kitan emperors used pseudo-kinship as a preferred political tool to establish alliances and reinforce their position in both external and domestic policies. A comparison of Kitan and Mongol traditions also shows a high degree of similarity. However, although they share concepts of sworn friendship and common oath rituals, the establishment of pseudo-kinship occurred in different contexts and often for different purposes. This article attempts to show that Kitan rulers successfully continued the pseudo-kinship diplomacy that existed since the Tang between the hegemons of the steppe and the Central Plain. They achieved this by making regular use of pseudo-kinship diplomacy, in addition to seeking ways to make the practice more acceptable to the Chinese court. These adaptations included a progressive estrangement of diplomatic pseudo-kinship from its original form, casting away oath rituals and adopting a new system of kinship terms.

During the course of our exploration of the history and architecture of central India, Mukhtar Ahmad Khān, a school teacher and local historian, directed our attention towards a collection of unpublished legal documents pertaining to the shrine of Shaykh Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in Dhār, Madhya Pradesh.1 As a corpus, these documents are concerned with grants of land, revenue, and legal issues regarding the management of the shrine, but they give, nonetheless, incidental information about the Chishtīs and the religious activities for which they were responsible. The shrine at Dhār—more correctly a dargāh—has enjoyed a continuous history from the fourteenth century to the present and is preeminent among the many Sufi places of pilgrimage in central India. Despite its manifest importance, the institutional, religious, and social histories of this dargāh await scholarly attention. The present article takes a first step in this direction by focusing on one crucial document that dates to the late seventeenth century.