Sublime

Born in the deserts of Najd to a devout Muslim family, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab displayed his religious zeal at a young age. Recognizing his talent for Quranic study, his father sent him to Medina to study with the disciples of Shah Wali Allah, who had only recently launched his campaign against Indian Sufism. Abd al-Wahhab was deeply influenced

Rheged might, in fact, have been a polyfocal kingdom, with key areas of economic productivity, royal centres and ecclesiastical patronage spread from the extreme west of Galloway as far as Carlisle and beyond, united by its seaways rather than as a coherent land unit.

Now ‘Citizen Tippoo’ was discovered by British interceptions to be in communication with Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he formally invited to visit India to liberate the country and expel the British. He had even sent ambassadors to Paris along with a draft treaty in which he proposed an alliance to drive the British out of India.73

The wording was sufficiently ambiguous to allow future generations of EIC officials to use it to claim jurisdiction over all English subjects in Asia, mint money, raise fortifications, make laws, wage war, conduct an independent foreign policy, hold courts, issue punishment, imprison English subjects and plant English settlements.

In the nineteenth century a particularly rich inhumation cemetery was partially excavated just east of the village of Sarre in the Isle of Thanet, in east Kent. The Wantsum Channel, which separated Thanet from the mainland until the end of the Middle Ages was, in Bede’s day, traversable on foot in just two places.39 Sarre (from the Brythonic word s

when Nizam Ali Khan acceded to the throne thirty-two years earlier in 1762, few would have guessed that, almost alone of the contending forces of the Deccan, it would be Hyderabad that would survive the vicissitudes of the next seventy-five years.