The Delhi Sultanate ruled northern India for over three centuries. The era, marked by the desecration of temples and construction of mosques from temple-rubble, is for many South Asians a lightning rod for debates on communalism, religious identity and inter-faith conflict. Using Persian and Arabic manuscripts, epigraphs and inscriptions, Fouzia Farooq Ahmad demystifies key aspects of governance and religion in this complex and controversial period. Why were small sets of foreign invaders and administrators able to dominate despite the cultural, linguistic and religious divides separating them from the ruled? And to what extent did people comply with the authority of sultans they knew very little about? By focusing for the first time on the relationship between the sultans, the bureaucracy and the ruled Muslim Rule in Medieval India outlines the practical dynamics of medieval Muslim political culture and its reception. This approach shows categorically that sultans did not possess meaningful political authority among the masses, and that their symbols of legitimacy were merely post hoc socio-cultural embellishments.Ahmad's thoroughly researched revisionist account is essential reading for all students and researchers working on the history of South Asia from the medieval period to the present day.

The Brethren of Purity, the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. The texts presented here, from the section on divine and legal sciences, work towards the conclusion of the world-view of the Epistles. In Epistle 49, the Brethren of Purity utilize their usual array of sources - Islamic, Hellenic, and far beyond - in probing the entire hierarchy of existence, from the nature of God to the most basic elements. Epistle 50 describes the 'proper attitudes' towards body and soul, for the attainment of wellness in this world and the hereafter, before addressing religious and philosophical worship. Finally, in Epistle 51, the Brethren consider the arrangement of the world as a whole, restating the Pythagorean theory that all existents are analogous to numbers, knowledge of the characteristics of which is therefore necessary for understanding the world. In advance of the final epistle, on magic, the vast encyclopedic project thus comes full-circle, directing the reader back to the topic of numbers with which the corpus begins.