April Edition of JRAS Now Available Online
I am pleased to say that the April edition of the 2025 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society has now been made available online on Cambridge Core. Fellows of our Society enjoy free access to all current and archived articles published in the Journal since 1834, so simply log in through our website with your account, head to the ‘Journal’ page via the top menu bar and click ‘Access the Journal’, which will then take you to the Cambridge Core site.
This edition contains articles on a wide range of topics, from the only known Ming-era print in China to a papyrus document on the Islamic tradition of renunciant piety, and from Indian nationalism to 17th-century Ottoman–Portuguese commercial agreements in the Iraqi port city of Basra. 7 out of the 10 articles are available via Open Access, so they are available to read for free for anyone. I have included below the abstracts of the articles, and links for the openly accessible ones. Enjoy!
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Talfīq as liberation: encountering ‘Alī al-Ghumuqī and global Islam in twentieth-century Dagestan
By Paolo Sartori, Shamil Shikhaliev
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.
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Interpreting the Qur’an through the science of logic: Ibn ʿArafah al-Warġammī (d. 803/1401) on the dynamics of tafsīr and manṭiq
By Tareq Moqbel
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.
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Arabic literary papyri and Islamic renunciant piety: Zabūr and hadith in Vienna papyrus AP 1854a–b
By Ursula Hammed, David Vishanoff
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.
[available via Open Access here]
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Sacred immigrants and travelling rituals: Malabar in the Sufi cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean
By Parappu Kadavath Matra Abdul Jaleel
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.
[available via Open Access here]
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Swaraj (circa 1885–1922): Gandhi and the early history of an untranslatable signifier
By Ritwik Ranjan
‘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.
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Giulio Aleni’s map sheet: exploring the contents and materiality of the only known Ming-era print
By Mario Cams, Elke Papelitzky
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.
[available via Open Access here]
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The Sufi shrine at Dhār in central India: documents for an economic and institutional history
By Saarthak Singh, Muntazir Ali, Vishwa Mohan Jha, Michael Willis
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. 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.
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The discourse of travel, society, and nation in Republican China
By António Eduardo Hawthorne Barrento
In the late 1920s and the 1930s a fully developed discourse emerged in China that linked either travel as a general concept (mostly with a primary focus on its leisure form) or tourism more specifically to the interests of society and the nation. This article analyses its development as it evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. For this purpose, it first probes into the discourse that surrounded, from the 1920s onwards, the constitution and the activity of the Travel Department of the Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank and of the China Travel Service, in line with which the travel service that one and the other provided was considered to involve dimensions of service to the nation and to society. The article proceeds by looking into two separate but ultimately linked lines of discourse that came to full bloom during the Nanjing decade and after: one that linked travel to the building of society, and another that linked it to the strengthening of the nation.
[available via Open Access here]
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Factories, capitulations, and the dilemmas of Ottoman-Portuguese detente in Basra, 1622-1722
By Michael O’Sullivan
This article examines Ottoman–Portuguese commercial agreements in Basra during the century after 1622 and the legal ambiguities that they engendered. On two separate occasions, the Portuguese established a factory in Basra: first in 1624 during the reign of the Afrāsiāb pasha (who governed in the name of the Ottomans from 1612 to 1667) and once again in 1690 when the city was ruled again by Ottoman governors (Ottoman direct rule was restored in 1667). Yet there were myriad issues that supplied cause for disputation between the two parties, not least the legal status of the factory itself. On the face of it, both the Portuguese and the Ottoman functionaries in Basra operated according to divergent models of extraterritorial trading privileges. After a century of expansion on the coasts of Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese had grown accustomed to the model of the factory (feitoria), in both those places in which the Portuguese governed in their own name and those in which they traded at the sufferance of African and Asian rulers. On the other hand, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottomans had granted so-called capitulations to European powers in the Mediterranean, which were governed by norms that were distinct from the factory model of Africa and Asia. Basra brought these two models into interaction and disrupted the straightforward implementation of either model. Frequent moments of misunderstanding and manoeuvring between the two sides were the result.
[available via Open Access here]
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Popular and learnèd in Chinese dialects
By Jerry Norman
This article classifies individual lexemes in Chinese dialects into four categories: popular, learnèd, colloquial, and literary. Popular and learnèd refer to the origins of a word: whether it has been transmitted orally or learned in an educational context. Colloquial and literary refer to usage. The traditional Chinese terms for distinguishing character readings, wén 文 and bái 白, literally ‘written’ and ‘spoken’, do not correspond neatly to the four categories that are proposed here. This article illustrates the differences between all six terms, mainly by using standard Mandarin and Běijīng dialect, and secondarily by using words from Mĭn and other dialects.
[available via Open Access here]
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The god with a thousand vulvas: heroic feminisation in ancient India and Greece
By Anahita Hoose
The Brahman sage Gautama cursed Indra with emasculation, in some versions through the appearance of vulvas on his body, as a punishment for intercourse with Gautama’s wife, Ahalyā; Ahalyā’s punishment involved detraction from her visible or physical presence. I present an analysis of the version as told in Padmapurāṇa 1.54. The story, in addition to reflecting male suspicion of women and dread of feminisation, simultaneously functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of succumbing to lust and reflects inter-varṇa tension: the weak-willed Indra, a divine kṣatriya, is humiliated by the continent Gautama, whose asceticism is the source of the devastating power that he unleashes against both Indra and Ahalyā. I also compare this myth to the Greek tales of Achilles, Herakles, and Teiresias’s feminisations, and suggest that the association of heroic feminisation with sexuality (as seen in the stories in which Indra, Achilles, and Herakles are feminised) may be a shared inheritance from Proto-Indo-European times. However, the myths of Achilles and Herakles’s feminisations, like that of Indra’s, are shaped by their specific cultural context: the feminised Greek heroes’ penetration of women is confirmation of their continued masculinity, rather than the result of a reprehensible lack of self-control.
[available via Open Access here]
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James Liu