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Both the Muslim exegetical tradition and most Western scholarship have posited that the termislāmin the Quran means “submission”, i.e. to God, and that it refers to the religion brought by the prophet Muhammad. This paper argues that neither of these assertions is correct. Rather, the abstract nounislāmas used in the Quran means “tradition”. It is underlain by the Aramaicmashlmānūtā, which in turn was the term generally used to translate the Greekparadosis. That the Greek usage had a direct impact on Arabic is also considered. The wide range of meanings givenparadosisby Greek and Syriac authors is surveyed. A close reading of Quran verses in which the wordislāmappears shows that it refers to the prophetic tradition of monotheism rather than the surrender of an individual to God. It is synonymous with the Logos of Abraham, in which all the monotheistic religions participate.

Egypt and Iraq display contrasting policies in the relationship between state and religion. Egypt's nationalist officer corps has subordinated political Islam, stigmatized the Muslim Brotherhood, and bended clerics to its will. While Arab Iraq presents two models, both hold a similar stance on religion: one an elected, parliamentary government dominated by political Islam and Shiite clerics; the other a theocratic Sunni caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Egypt and Iraq are heirs to two differing Ottoman solutions to the problem of religion-state relations, the legacy of which is often overlooked. The most prevalent model subordinates clergy and religion to the state in the tradition of Mehmet I. This model is characteristic of the empire in its glory years and would have been recognized by Suleyman the Magnificent. In the other model, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Hamidian caliphate, the head of state claimed temporal and religious authority to combat colonial penetration. Neither Ottoman nor colonial norms of governance, nor nationalist states succeeding them, developed methods to deal with multiethnic states or avoid a tyranny of the majority. Unlike the modernizing Ottoman caliphate, however, the caliphates of Mulla Omar and Ibrahim al-Samarra'i display a literalist reading of sharia and a ruthless disregard of humane prohibitions in mainstream Islamic law against killing innocents. Of the two models, the likely victor is the state-centric subordination of religion because latter-day caliphates have flourished only briefly as radical and sectarian movements in rugged territories where power vacuums existed.

“Prejudice is an antipathy based on faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group or an individual of that group.” So the social psychologist Gordon Allport defined prejudice in a 1954 book on the subject. My focus today is on a specific sort of prejudice and discrimination, that against Muslims. Prejudice is generally recognized as similar in meaning to bias, and as having to do with attitudes and beliefs. Discrimination is the practical disadvantaging of the member of a class of persons, not for his or her personal actions but for those associated with his or her group by the majority in society.

FOR HISTORIANS, SPECIALISTS IN RELIGION, AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS INTERESTED in matters such as millenarianism or religion-state relations in Iran, the H-Bahai digital library (http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/-bahai/) is increasingly becoming a treasure trove of primary and secondary sources. Humanities and Social Sciences Online or H-Net (at http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/), a consortium of over 100 academic email discussion groups, is housed at Michigan State University and supported by that institution as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among its many thriving lists are a handful that concentrate on Middle East Studies, including H-Turk and H-Levant. The only list so far with a specific Iran focus is H-Bahai, which focuses not only on the Bahali faith, but also on the Shaykhi and Babi movements and on thinkers and groups that intersect with these religious movements originating in the Qajar period. The discussions have often been lively, covering topics from the Constitutional Revolution in Iran to Shicite theology, and from Baha3i conversions in India and Malaysia to controversies of the Nicmatullahi Sufis. The discussion logs are available to academics at the main web page. The username is H-Bahai and the password is listpass. The list began in 1997 with about 70 subscribers and now has over two hundred members. Subscribers are required to have done graduate study in the social sciences or humanities. H-Net also provides the discussion lists with generous server space for web pages, but to date only H-Bahai and H-Africa have taken real advantage of the possibilities inherent in this medium. Although the vast majority of Iranians is Shicite Muslim, religious minorities have played a disproportionate cultural, social and economic role in modem Iran. Debates over the place of non-Muslims have also been crucial to its history. Shicism, a dynamic tradition, threw up a number of new religious traditions in the nineteenth century. Shaykhism synthesized religious motifs from esoteric Shicism, rationalism, and mysticism. Babism, a messianic or mahdist movement

The shape of a distribution of calibrated 14C dates displays spurious peaks and troughs, brought about by changes in the slope of the calibration curve interacting with the spreading effect of the stochastic distribution of counting errors. The distortion results in a positive correlation between the numbers of dates per calendar year and the slopes of the calibration curves, for assemblages of archaeological dates from such widely separated areas as British Columbia, South Australia and New Zealand. The distortion also increases the possibility of date reversals, and increases the overall spread of calibrated 14C dates. After taking into account this systematic distortion and inbuilt age of charcoal and wood samples, we estimate dates for the initial settlement and first appearance of fortifications, and infer a likely trend of population growth for prehistoric New Zealand.

Between 1905 and 1911, Iranians were engaged in a protracted struggle over whether a constitutionalist regime would replace royal absolutism.1 Little in Iran's political culture before 1905 had hinted at this conflict before it broke out, and for the past thirty years historians have been seeking this genealogy for it. Most have searched among the papers of officials and diplomats, often examining unpublished or posthumously published manuscripts with little or no contemporary circulation, at least before the revolution,2 but we might get closer to its context if we look at what was going on outside the governmental elite. Here I will explore the growth of belief in representative government within an Iranian millenarian movement, the Bahai faith, in the last third of the 19th century, as an example of how the new ideas circulated that led to the conflict.3 Historians have noted a link between millenarianism and democratic or populist thought elsewhere, after all; for instance they have long recognized the importance of chiliastic ideas in e English Revolution of the 17th century. The republicanism of American dissidents and revolutionaries was also sometimes tinged with a civil millennialism. The Bahais of Iran, too, combined democratic rhetoric with millenarian imagery in the generation before the Constitutional Revolution.4

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.—Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesMarco Polo's encounter with Kublai Khan, which Italo Calvino made the framework for his exploration of the fantastic in urban life, stands as a useful parable for the nature of the interaction of West and East in the period between 1200 and 1700, when myriads of Europeans produced journals and accounts of their journeys into the rest of the world.

The emergence of feminist thought in Egypt at the turn of the last century has often been remarked upon, but there has been little rigorous analysis of its social context and background. As keen an observer as Gabriel Baer has ventured to write that in nineteenth-century Egypt “evidently the traditional structure of the family and the status of women did not undergo any change at all.” On the face of it, however, it seems highly unlikely that the expansion of the urban and rural middle classes, the emergence of private property, the period of state capitalism, and the onset of colonial rule could have left women unaffected.

Laboratory experiments show that pieces of melting ice about one centimetre across, moving under normal loads across roughened glass surfaces, travel much faster than regelation theory predicts. The discrepancy is as much as 40 times for the finest scale surfaces, (prepared by grinding with carborundum particles of 60 μm mean diameter) and increases further if the load is reduced below three bars. On the other hand melting ice moves, under similar conditions, across rough porous glass surfaces at approximately the speed predicted by regelation theory. We suggest the reason is that melt water, produced by the dissipation of frictional energy, accumulates at the interface between ice and ground glass where it promotes sliding, but can easily drain away from a porous surface. Similar effects at the bed of a temperate glacier may cause the contribution of regelation to the bed-slip process to depend sensitively upon the melt-water regime.

SynopsisA collisionless gas flows through a finite rectangular duct which reflects molecules diffusely. The transmission probability Q of the duct involves the solution of a pair of coupled integral equations. Complementary variational principles have been employed which supply upper and lower bounds to Q. Numerical calculations have been made for a variety of duct shapes and compared, where appropriate, to those of other authors.

Intellectual biography as a discipline assumes that the life and thought of an individual can shed light on an epoch. In some cases such a claim is justified, especially where the epoch is obscure and the thinker genuinely representative of the culture of a profession in a city or region. I shall argue the validity of this principle with regard to eighteenth century west-central Iran and Mohammad Mehdi Niraqi (d. 1794), a prominent Imami Shi˓i religious scholar who wrote prolifically and authored a huge three-volume work on ethics. Most of his voluminous writing remains in manuscript, but enterprising scholars in Najaf published the book on ethics, Jāmi˓ as-sa˓ādat (Compendium of Happiness), and it has recently been reissued in Beirut.The political turmoil of eighteenth century Iran at least partially explains the difficulty modern historians have in understanding its cultural history between the fall of the Safavids in 1722 and the rise of the Qajars around 1785.

Comparative studies pose special problems for historians, given their long tradition of being wed to the political history of individual countries and given the limitations of their methods, which lend themselves to (at most) middlerange generalizations. Sociology and anthropology have always seemed better poised to deal with the big questions across cultures. The rise of social history, however, provides new opportunities for comparative studies, insofar as such social entities and processes as cities, social classes, crowds, and women lend themselves better to comparison than do micropolitics within the framework of a single country's history. Despite these new possibilities, most historians demand intense contextualization and mistrust secondary sources, making it difficult for one scholar to master the relevant languages and archives in more than one culture, or to pose a broad enough question for comparative analysis. Much social history, even by the most sociologically minded historian, is likely to be based on archives and concerned largely with a single country or culture. Social historians can, however, legitimately inject a comparative element into their writing by paying special attention to the international aspects of their subject and by considering their works about particular social groups in individual countries as case studies in related phenomena.

SynopsisFunctionals are found that give upper and lower bounds to the inner product 〈g0, f〉 involving the unknown solution f of a non-linear equation T[f] = f0, with f∈H, a real Hilbert space, g0 a given function in H and f0 a given function in the range of the non-linear operator T. The method depends upon a re-ordering of terms in the expansion of T[f] about a trial function so as to transfer the non-linearity to a secondary problem that requires its own particular treatment and to enable earlier results obtained for linear operators to be used for the main part. First, bivariational bounds due to Barnsley and Robinson are re-derived. The new and more accurate bounds are given under relaxed assumptions on the operator T by introducing a third approximating function. The results are obtained from identities, thus avoiding some of the conditions imposed by the use of variational methods. The accuracy of the new method is illustrated by applying it to the problem of the heat contained in a bar.

It has long been held that the eighteenth century was a pivotal one in the history of Imami Shi'i thought and jurisprudence in Iraq and Iran. At the beginning of this era, it is said, the previously dominant Usuli school declined, and the conservative Akhbari school came to the fore. This intellectual revolution coincided with the fall of the Safavid dynasty in Iran and the disestablishment of Shilism under the Afghans and then Nadir Shah. Standard accounts would have us believe that Akhbarism became dominant. Then late in the century, as the Qajars came to power, the Usuli school staged a comeback in the shrine cities of Iraq and subsequently in Iran.1 This version of events, deriving from published nineteenth-century Usuli works, contains elements of truth. But an examination of manuscript sources from the period and of later biographical dictionaries suggests that the standard view needs revision. In particular, the periodization needs to be made more precise and the biographies of the major in

SynopsisInformation concerning the carcinogenicity of bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) in different species and organs is reviewed. Various methods used in attempts to identify the plant components responsible are described and the results evaluated. Reference is made to recent and current research in this field (University College of North Wales, Bangor) and includes mutagenic and sterility studies, and the introduction of teratogenic screening by injection of Japanese quail eggs. The many problems still challenging bracken workers are indicated, and a final section deals with the potential hazard to human health in an attempt to link experimental work with epidemiological surveys of human cancer incidence. One important result of the study of bracken carcinogenicity is that active components, previously thought to be harmless, can be found in a wide variety of regular dietary items.

We have found that micrographs of conventional epoxy sections up to 0.25 μm in thickness taken at either 200 kV or 1000 kV are of equally good quality, although at some thickness beyond 0.25 μm there is a rapid divergence in quality. We note that even lOOkV microscopes can be used with sections up to about 0.5 μm for prescreening grids to be viewed on higher voltage instruments.Although several papers have been published dealing with resolution at different specimen thicknesses and/or different accelerating voltages, we are not aware of data relating to the maximum useful specimen thickness for biological work at 200 kV. Only one paper involved biological specimens using acclerating voltages lower than 400 kV.

In recent years, non-human primates have become indispensable as experimental animals in many fields of biomedical research. Pharmaceutical and related industries alone use about 2000,000 primates a year. Respiratory mite infestations in lungs of old world monkeys are of particular concern because the resulting tissue damage can directly effect experimental results, especially in those studies involving the cardiopulmonary system. There has been increasing documentation of primate parasitology in the past twenty years.