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Known as the “granary” of Rome in Pre-Islamic times, Egypt’s fertile agrarian base also enabled it to be the pre-eminent grower of flax in pre-modern times. In the Mediterranean and beyond, the country was by far the largest producer of linen, a commodity so vital that it not merely underpinned the textile industry but was also the linchpin of the whole economy.1 Most surviving Egyptian textiles are made of linen, twenty-two varieties of which are known from the Geniza docu ments.2 Linen,

The disputes amongst the Khojas regarding the payment of dues, the use of common property, the management of the community came under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. This treatment of Khojas under the civil court has two genealogies, (1) the conception of colonial religious groups and (2) the secularization of state rule. I shall discuss these briefly below and then we will go on to the manner in which the Ginan were employed in this discussion

The Fatimid era is ubiquitous today in the discourse of the Nizari Ismaili imamate.1 Yet this was not always the case. As with other societies and religious communities the world over, the arrangement and presentation of history in the Ismaili tradition has evolved in the course of time, with new historiographical agendas and subjects of emphasis emerging or receding in response to changes in the political and social contexts. In this chapter the place of the Fatimids in the cultural memory of the Nizari Ismailis in the post-Mongol era will be explored.

This essay explores the architectural history of Jerusalem in the Abbasid (751– 970) and Fatimid (970– 1036) periods. Compared to the time of the Umayyads (661– 750), Abbasid-era Jerusalem was characterized by a caliphal disinterest in the monuments of the holy city. However, it also saw growth in the identification between local populations and their respective religious monuments. This contest over sacred space culminated under the Fatimid dynasty, in the cataclysmic reign of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (r.

Ginans are devotional songs rooted in the musical and poetic matrix of Indian culture. The term "ginan" carries a double significance: on the one hand, it means "religious knowledge" or "wisdom," analogous to the Sanskrit word jnana
(knowledge).2 On the other hand, it means "song" or "recitation," suggesting a link to the Arabic ghanna and the Urdu/Hindi ghana, both verbs meaning "to sing."3 For the past seven hundred years, Ismailis from the Indian subcontinent

The Ismailis are one of the largest Muslim minority populations of Central Asia, and they make up the second largest Shiʿi Muslim community globally. First emerging in the second half of the 8th century, the Ismaili missionary movement spread into many areas of the Islamic world in the 10th century, under the leadership of the Ismaili Fatimids caliphs in Egypt. The movement achieved astounding success in Central Asia in the 10th century, when many of the political and cultural elites of the region were converted.

By Dr. Gulshan Khaki

This presentation is partly based on my published paper [1] dealing with Khojki script as found in some of the earliest manuscripts that I had access to. Prior to discussing the script, I would briefly like to present its history.

The Khōjā are an Indic Muslim caste whose origins lie in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Punjab and Kashmir. Over the following centuries a section of the community began a migration down the Indus valley and eastward into Kutch and Kathiawar, located in present-day Gujarat. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the community began to migrate as traders throughout the western Indian Ocean littoral, establishing trading networks from Zanzibar to China (Nānjiāṇī 1–40, 256).

The Khojki script is an Indian script whose origins are in Sindh (now southern Pakistan), a region that has witnessed the conflict between Islam and Hinduism for more than 1,200 years. After the gradual occupation of the region by Muslims from the 8th century onwards, the region underwent significant cultural changes.

In this monograph prepared in 1991 for presentation at the SOS Khojki Conference organised by the Heritage Society, Professor Shin Nomoto discusses the role of Adam in history from the point of view of two sources of Fatimid Origin:

1) From the Kitak al-Riyad of Da'i Hami al-Din Khirmani(d.1021AD) with reference to the debate on Adam's Prophecy by Abu Hatim al-razi (d.935) and Abu Yaqub Sijistani.

2) The second sources used in this monograph is from the 13th Century Tayyibi Da'i husayn b. Ali b. Muhammad b. al-Walid (d.1298)

Except for a handful of recent sources, there has been a lack of ample introductory level texts suitable for teaching Shi'ism to undergraduate students. Andrew Newman’s Twelver Shiism: Unity and Diversity in the Life of Islam, 632 to 1722 (Edinburgh U.P., 2013), Farhad Daftary’s A History of Shi6i Islam (I.B.Tauris, 2013) and Najam Haider’s Shi6i Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge U.P., 2014) have begun to fill in this gap. Daftary, and Amyn Sajoo and Shainool Jiwa,have added to this brief list the essays collected in The Shi6' World: Pathways in Tradition and Modernity.

INTRODUCTION

This is a unique work on the Vedas as sources for Sathpanthi Ginans. The article was prepared by late Dr Gulshan Khakee, a pioneer Ismaili Scholar from Harvard.

Preface by Heritage Admin:

I read her Thesis on Das Avatara in the late 1970s’ and while searching for Manuscript in Gujarat in 1988, the “Mota Kaka”, the leaders of the Imam Shahis in Pirana told me that she came in the early 1970s’ to visit and was a dedicated researcher, they gave her a manuscript of the “Anant Akhado.”