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The geopolitical shape of the Middle East has varied greatly over time. This article is concerned with the period from Late Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century, during which four basic configurations succeeded each other. Late Antiquity was marked by the coexistence of two large empires, one based in the western Middle East and the other in the eastern Middle East; the early Islamic period saw the dominance of a single empire the location of whose centre was unstable; the medieval period was characterised by the absence of large and lasting empires and a shifting plurality of smaller states; finally in the Ottoman period we see the renewed dominance of a single empire, now based in the western Middle East. Are these changes to be seen as random fluctuations, or can they be explained in terms of a small number of underlying factors? The point of this article is to argue that a focus on the potential imperial heartlands of the Middle East can help us to explain much—though not all—of the changing geopolitical configuration of the region.

Epistles of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, the founder of the Wahhābī movement in eighteenth-century Najd, are preserved in profusion in Wahhābī sources. One of them is a short epistle, clearly intended for a lay audience, that sets out basic Wahhābī dogma in terms of four principles (qawāʿid). This epistle is preserved by Wahhābī sources in several different versions; none of them are dated, making it hard to establish how the text evolved over time. The present study is based on two dated external witnesses to the text of the epistle. One is taken from an unpublished Baṣran refutation of 1745, and is translated here. The other is found in a Yemeni chronicle under the events of the year 1212/1797f. Thanks to these two fixed points, it is possible to construct a plausible account of the evolution of the text over the intervening decades. From this it is clear that while written transmission played a significant part in the evolution of the text, some of the more dramatic changes are the result of oral intervention. Moreover the role of orality is confirmed by evidence suggesting the extensive use of the epistle in oral settings, an illustration of the strong concern of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to spread his message among the laity.

A review of the origins and development of English local record offices in the period after World War II, based on the personal experience of the author. The paper deals with the climate of opinion, the work of relevant public bodies, such as the National Register of Archives, the British Records Association, government action and published studies. It covers the origins of records management, professional training and staffing.

This chapter addresses the dating of traditions in early Islamic religious literature. The first and second centuries of Islam, a large part of the available material consists of traditions-much shorter texts whose real or supposed authorship and provenance are indicated by a chain of authorities, the isnad. Since this literary form comprises so much of our material, and embraces such a range of subject matter, anyone concerned with the first two centuries of Islam needs to know when this material originated. And since a tradition exposes far less surface area to dating probes than a book, he will not easily get to know. But if the authors proceed in such a fashion, they should be clear what they are doing. Eschatology is one of the rare fields in which they can hope to find traditions susceptible of hard dating on external grounds.

Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions Essays in honor of Helen Willa Samuels Terry Cook (Ed.) Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2011 434 pp., ISBN: 1-931666-36-9 (US $56...

During the 95th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, the Space Weather Conference convened a special session on improving communication related to space weather events and impacts. Space weather sounds frightening to the public; thus, it can be a communication challenge for space weather enthusiasts and professionals in the field [e.g., Vanlommel et al., 2014]. Casual use of words such as “coronal mass ejections-CMEs” and “geomagnetic storms” could unnecessarily alarm the public.

In Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug’, (1843) the main protagonist, William Legrand, is bitten by a bug he has discovered on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. Eventually, the half-crazed Legrand uses the insect as a means to uncover the lost treasure of Captain Kidd, the infamous pirate. The story involves the use of cryptography with a detailed description of a method for solving a simple substitution cipher using letter frequencies. Although the discovery of the treasure restores Legrand’s fortunes, the heart of the story is the obsession induced by the pursuit of the hoard. Even after the treasure has been found, Legrand seems as interested in demonstrating how he broke the cipher, which seems to be the focus for his mania, as in the pecuniary reward it brings. The title, in fact, is a neat play on words; although Legrand is physically bitten by the bug, it is also a reference to his mental state.

(1993). University archives: Changing approaches to professional practice. Journal of the Society of Archivists: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 209-212.

THE Kitaib al-fitan of Nucaym ibn Hammad (d. 228/843) contains a wealth of early Islamic eschatological traditions which is without parallel in any other source.' One of these traditions is quite unlike the rest, and it is to this aberrant tradition that this study is devoted.2 Most traditions contained in the Fitan, and in other sources for early Muslim eschatology, are no more than a few lines in length. Rather than presenting a comprehensive picture of the eschatological future, a typical tradition deals only with a particular theme, episode, or personality in the future history of the community. Like Muslim traditions at large, these eschatological traditions are ascribed to the Prophet or to subsequent authorities of the early Islamic period. Early Muslim eschatological traditions are thus very different in character from nonMuslim apocalypses of the same period, whether Jewish3 or Christian,4 and from their earlier antecedents.5 These apocalypses tend to be longer and to offer more comprehensive accounts of the eschatological future, sometimes to the point of being veritable

At the end of all this analysis of the doctrines of the scholars, it is natural to ask what forbidding wrong was really like in the pre-modern Islamic world. But in attempting to answer this question, we are almost entirely at the mercy of the same scholars. They are not just the guardians of doctrine; they are also the authors of the biographical works that give us most of our material for the study of the practice of the duty. We have no journalists, anthropologists, novelists or secularists to give us different perspectives. We thus have almost no way to emancipate ourselves from the world-view of the scholars, short of not believing a word they say. With rare exceptions, the best we can do is to use common sense to discount some of what they tell us, and occasional cunning to go behind it. This chapter will accordingly describe the practice of forbidding wrong pretty much as the scholars saw it. As already indicated, one of the best sources for this enterprise is biographical literature. The Muslim scholars devoted biographical works to such groups as poets, grammarians, Koran reciters, and even women – but above all to their fellow scholars. Before modern times the idea does not seem to have occurred to anyone to collect into a single work biographical material on those who forbade wrong. But the broad range of biographical literature contains much scattered evidence of the practice of forbidding wrong by individual Muslims.

Le present article est un commentaire d'un court texte dans lequel Ibn Qutayba (IXe siecle) confronte une tradition embarrassante concernant des singes. Dans ce passage, Ibn Qutayba, traditionaliste et homme de lettres engage dans la restauration de l'orthodoxie de l'islam apres la Mihna, fait des suggestions a l'adresse de ceux qui sont en recherche de modeles religieux appropries. Deux camps s'affrontaient sur la nature de Dieu : le transcendantalisme de l'elite s'opposait a l'anthropomorphisme des foules populaires. Mais le texte etudie ici decrit seulement une echauffouree dans une histoire invraisemblable de singes, qui n'est pourtant pas hors de propos, car de telles histoires etaient exploitees par un elitiste pour faire rougir son antagoniste issu du peuple.

Najd is a remote and somewhat featureless region of central Arabia. In the eleventh to twelfth/seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, it was inhabited by an Arab population of modest means and predominantly tribal structure. This population was partly nomadic, and partly settled; the settled population inhabited a considerable number of smallish oases. Politically, the nomadic and settled populations seem to have belonged to different worlds, each characterised by a fairly small scale of political organisation. Of the two, it is the settled population which concerns us. Here we find ourselves in a world of oasis-states, for the most part ruled by petty tyrants stemming from locally dominant lineages. Political instability within oases was the order of the day; so also was conflict between oases. In neither case does conflict seem

One of the less prominent episodes associated with the conquest of Mecca in the year 8 is an encounter between the Arabian Prophet and a Persian cheese. A tradition quoted by Bayhaqī (d. 458) from Abū Dāwūd al-Ṭayālisī (d. 203) tells the story as follows: ‘When the Apostle of God conquered Mecca, he saw a cheese. He asked what it was; they told him that it was a foodstuff made in Persia (arḍ al-'Ajam). The Apostle of God responded: “Take a knife to it, invoke the name of God, and eat”.’ Similar encounters take place in Ṭā'if in the same year, in Tabūk in the following year, and at places and times unknown.