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This chapter discusses the Hindu–Muslim entente and the Lucknow Pact. It looks at the factors that affected the achievement of this entente. It then examines the Bombay session of the All-India Muslim League, which was a very important achievement of Wazir Hasan and Mahmudabad. Here, the discussion shifts to the ‘Lucknow clique’, a group of Muslim politicians who were patronized by the Mahmudabad raja. It then discusses the Lucknow Pact, which was considered a great achievement during the time. Unfortunately, it was unable to meet the goals of its authors, that is, to establish Hindu–Muslim unity. The chapter notes that it was the religious issue of the Ottoman and Khilafat Empire that became the rallying point for Hindu–Muslim unity.

This chapter discusses how Afghan women have coped across the decades with physical disabilities, most of which today are the result of war and land mines, and starts by presenting an overview of traditional medicine practiced throughout Afghanistan. Western medical techniques may first have been introduced by Amir Abdur Rahman, who imported a Scottish nurse for the women of his harem. Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital was the country's designated orthopedic center. The hospitals in Kabul continued to operate during the Great Disaster, but under Soviet control. The cruelest aspect of war is the damage done to noncombatants. For the future, disabled Afghan women can expect better care from Afghan PTs, if the recommendations made recently by a British PT and her two colleagues are followed up. The author experienced hard times, pain, hunger, and rejection only vicariously through the stories of Afghan women and their families.

Later dynasties detested the Fatimids. Al-Hakim's government administration depended on a series of subordinate ranks, a true bureaucracy, ranging from offices at the top. Given that the empire in his time stretched over vast territories, only part of which was Egypt, a description of government operations in the capital does not reliably indicate the situation elsewhere. Those reports tend to deal in more detail with the highest ranks—wazir and qadi, for example—and pay less and less attention to the lower. The choosing of the men appointed to high office was, in general, carefully managed; and those chosen were constantly supervised afterward by the imam. The primary exception to such a policy occurred when al-'Aziz raised one of his aides, Ya'qub Ibn Killis, to the position of wazir in 978. Al-Hakim continued this latter policy of his father; he himself appointed no wazirs.

Studies of legitimacy in the medieval Maghrib have considered political, religious, social, and economic power, but rarely the political motivations of those who write the sources of the era. Although archaeology has made some promising advances, the basis for our understanding of these factors comes primarily from historical sources written by a particular class of scholar. Most historians of the medieval Maghrib were also ministers and advisors with their own specific and highly political interests. These writers were far from passive referees on the sidelines of history. Their portrayal of what was legitimate or even of what was history often had to do with their own political interests as learned ministers. Using Ibn Khaldūn’s autobiography, this chapter argues that to understand legitimacy in the fourteenth century a deeper understanding of the personal and political motivations of historians is needed.

This chapter examines the sometimes precarious relationship of the Mongols' Muslim servitors with infidel khans, their Muslim ministers and officials, especially those who were in attendance at court and in the ordo, and their non-Muslim colleagues. It also discusses the shifting balance of power between Mongol grandees and Tājīks who served as civilian officials, as well as the extent to which these very disparate ruling cadres were in the process of integration. After providing an overview of the Ilkhans (1258–1297) and their kinsfolk, the chapter looks at Muslim ministers at the centre and in the provinces. It also considers the Ilkhans, their Muslim ministers and their historians; civil and military functions, focusing on the Mongol viceroy and Tājīk wazir; and the difficulties faced by the highest-ranking Muslims under the pagan Ilkhans.

In the valuable information – selective torture equilibrium occurring under both questioning types, the Cooperative Detainee provides information satisfying the Interrogator, who therefore does not torture afterwards. She does, however, torture a Detainee who does not provide information because she believes that the Detainee is Resistant rather than Innocent when a Detainee fails to reveal anything valuable. In other words, the equilibrium depends on torturing an Innocent Detainee for telling the truth of his innocence. After locating this equilibrium in the parameter space, the chapter investigates the equilibrium’s formal properties and uses these to identify multiple trade-offs between information and torture and even a paradox in the logic of interrogational torture. The chapter illustrates the equilibrium with two case studies, one of the Gafgen kidnapping case in Germany and one of a CIA detainee named Pasha Wazir, before returning to the model.

This chapter sketches the consolidation of the imamate since the departure of the Ottomans from Yemen in 1918-19, and the formation of an opposition movement against the autocratic rule of Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din in the 1930s and 40s. It highlights ‘Abdullah al-Wazir’s career as the prime negotiator and signatory of the Treaty of Ta’if following the first Saudi-Yemeni war in 1934 and as the supreme leader (Imam) of the embryonic constitutional imamate in 1948. Dealing with key data such as the failure of the constitutional revolt and ‘Abdullah al-Wazir’s and Amat al-Latif’s husband’s execution, this chapter provides the backdrop against which the following ones become intelligible.