Scholarly Elite Research Articles

The Economic Policy of Gábor Bethlen and Its Legal Implications

The background for this research and the writing of this article is that the 400<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the death of Gábor Bethlen is approaching, and the Corpus Juris Hungarici and some representatives of the Hungarian scholarly elite (see e.g. Trócsányi) play a significant role in the literature researched. The role of Gábor Bethlen Hungarian and Transylvanian history can be, and probably should not be, disputed, because his domestic, foreign and economic policies served to maintain the "Hungarian" state of the Principality of Transylvania. Its practical implementation can always be subject to so-called "criticism". In this respect, it is worth examining both the theoretical and the practical aspects, as well as the legal and economic-historical aspects, as far as possible, including tax and economic policy and, where appropriate, the various (even sociological) aspects of these, since their outline may be of assistance to the legislators of today. As a result of the research, it can be concluded that the Transylvanian state tax system is particularly striking in this respect; the levying of taxes without regard to the mate-rial strength of the subjects is in stark contrast to the idea that Transylvania in this period can be equated with absolu-tism in the Western sense, nor does it elevate the Principality of Transylvania to the rank of Western absolutism, although it was an indication of the prince's unlimited power that he could "abolish" the Diet. The reason for this was that he did not change the structure of the estates and central govern-ment that had existed since 1541.

Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600 by Peter K. Bol

<i>Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600</i> by Peter K. Bol

Under the Yoke of Ottoman Domination: Slavery and Central European Philhellenism During the Greek War of Independence

Slavery remained a problem for Central Europeans after the defeat of Napoleon. Concerns over White, Christian enslavement animated German-speaking European responses to the Greek Independence movement. As most antislavery advocates turned their attention to the increasing volume of the slaves traded between Africa and the New World, as well as the persistence and entrenchment of New World slavery, Central Europeans turned their attention to the Christian, Greek subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The so-called ‘Barbary Problem’ ( Barbareskenfrage) became enmeshed with the Eastern Question as Greeks revolted in Ottoman lands. Central Europeans had long viewed the domination of Christians in Islamic North Africa as the central problem of slavery until increased German migration and involvement in the New World brought new tensions to the ideas surrounding slavery. Greek insurrectionists against the Ottoman Empire breathed new life into older ideas about Christians enslaved in Islamic portions of Europe and Africa. Greek Independence gave Germans a bête noir closer to Europe than that of slavery in the Americas. Much of this interest owes to an enduring German philhellenic tradition which has been seldom analysed. Indeed, as Sue Marchand has written ‘the obsession of the Schillerian German literary and scholarly elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted-if severely underanlaysed-cliché’. This paper uses archival documents to shed more light on how Central Europeans’ interest and participation in the Greek War of Independence helped to revive old ideas about Christian enslavement at a time when New World slavery became the central concern of a broader European humanitarian protest against servitude.

Intimacies of the Future: Techno-Orientalism,All-under-Heaven (Tian-Xia天下), and Afrofuturism

In this article, I draw out the intimacies between techno-Orientalism, All-under-Heaven (Tian-Xia 天下), and Afrofuturism. Using Lisa Lowe’s framework of “intimacies,” I put together these three different areas of study by linking international relations theory with the study of speculative fiction. I expand on criticisms of the Euro-Modern linear liberal narrative by connecting this to Black scholars who push back against the invisibility of Black people in science fiction. I also complicate the image of an advanced “East” as merely a “Western” imagination by connecting that to Asian political imaginations of their own future, specifically those of Chinese political leaders and scholarly elite. Last, I highlight the radical promise of speculative artwork in creating new political imaginations through a close reading of Afrofuturist philosophy and media productions.

Playing upon knowledge through language games: Lyotard’s ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’

Lyotard's seminal work The Postmodern Condition has been considered one of the most influential works of postmodernism. It has inspired thinkers and scholars in its criticism and report of the knowledge and its suggestiveness of paralogies. Many scholars even today draw on his definition of postmodernism as the incredulity of metanarratives. The text has been selected to be closely read and understood from the Foucauldian viewpoint of the creation of regimes of truth which we have argued that the text is involved in the same practice of creating its hegemonic place by making certain assumptions and assertions over nature, status, and forms of knowledge. We have also contended that Lyotard's interests are involved in writing this text, particularly in the propagation of the concept of paralogies and rejection of grand narratives. The text has also been viewed from Van Dijk's perspective that certain scholars who are given value by the elite to be part of the scholarly elite control academic discourses which are specifically disseminated and propagated to influence humanity. This is how the postmodern condition has been generated, produced, disseminated, legitimized and propagated worldwide.

U.S.–Bulgarian Exchange of Scientists and State Security: Cold War Case Study

Declassified archive documents from the Ministry of the Interior in Bulgaria were used to examine and analyze the subversive activity of U.S. intelligence against Bulgaria conducted via the scientific exchange of these two countries. These documents expose Bulgarian intelligence and counterintelligence’s interest, methods, means, and approach with the United States during the Cold War. Although U.S. researchers and scholars represented only a small portion of the U.S. citizens temporarily residing in Bulgaria, they were considered the most dangerous because they had access to the Bulgarian cultural and scholarly elite, hence the opportunity to exert political influence on it.

Depicting a Meritocratic Empire

Depicting a Meritocratic Empire Vera Kaplan (bio) A. E. Ivanov, Uchenoe dostoinstvo v Rossiiskoi imperii, XVIII–nachalo XX veka: Podgotovka i nauchnaia attestatsiia professorov i prepodavatelei vysshei shkoly (Scholarly Merit in the Russian Empire, 18th–Early 20th Centuries: Preparation and Scholarly Evaluation of Professors and Lecturers in Institutions of Higher Education). 656 pp. Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2016. ISBN-13 978-5948813349. Frances Nethercott, Writing History in Late Imperial Russia: Scholarship and the Literary Canon. 280 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1350130401. $120.00. E. A. Rostovtsev, Stolichnyi universitet Rossiiskoi imperii: Uchenoe soslovie, ob­ shchestvo i vlast´, vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX veka (The University of the Russian Empire's Capital City: The Learned Estate, Society, and Power in the Second Half of the 19th–Early 20th Centuries). 903 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5824320220. T. N. Zhukovskaia and K. S. Kazakova, Anima universitatis: Studenchestvo Peterburgskogo universiteta v pervoi polovine XIX veka (Anima Universitatis: The Students of St. Petersburg University in the First Half of the 19th Century). 576 pp. Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2018. ISBN-13 978-5948814216. At the dawn of perestroika, when the desire for change affected almost every aspect of public life in the Soviet Union, somebody once suggested cancelling a minuscule addition to the salary of people with a Candidate of Sciences degree (kandidat nauk, a Soviet version of the PhD) who had written their dissertation on absolutely useless topics—for example, a history of education [End Page 129] in tsarist Russia. However, the political and social reforms of the late 1980s, the eventual dismantling of the Soviet Union and reemergence of Russia out of its rubble moved the issue of education, and especially its prerevolutionary history, into the limelight of public discussion and scholarly research. There were several reasons for this. The aspiration to break from the recent Soviet past and to find a line of continuity with imperial Russia led to growing interest in this period of history. The attempt to get rid of the suffocating straitjacket of the Marxist scheme of historical development, which underlined the centrality of the "class struggle," and hence of political history, contributed to the growing popularity of cultural studies, especially of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. This trend was strengthened in the following decade as a result of the increased interaction between Russian and Western scholars precisely at a time when Western Slavic studies underwent the "cultural turn." Last, but definitely not least, the opening of the Russian archives provided fertile ground for launching new research on various aspects of Russian preand postrevolutionary education, while new perspectives on the topic led to a significant broadening of this field. In the past two decades, important new studies have enriched the field of the history of Russian higher education, and especially of its pillar—the universities.1 These studies, produced inside and outside Russia, depict the image of a meritocratic empire and explore its distinct formation as well as the resilience of its educational culture, which outlived the tsarist state as a political entity. This review surveys four such studies that have appeared in recent years. [End Page 130] ________ Ivanov's book is devoted to the history of academic degrees (uchenye stepeni) in the Russian Empire. The author already published a book on this subject in 1994, and his new book presents the results of his continuing work on the problem, including a survey of the practice of awarding academic degrees not only by the universities but also by the ecclesiastical academies and higher professional schools. Ivanov demonstrates the significance of academic degrees from two interconnected perspectives.2 On the one hand, they constituted part of the system of titles and ranks that permeated Russian imperial society and served the government as an instrument for forming the national scholarly elite; on the other hand, they contributed to the cohesive functioning of scholarship as a distinct social and cultural institution. Academic degrees, Ivanov claims, provided their bearers with distinct rights and privileges: a respected position in the system of higher education, advancement through the Table of Ranks, and an opportunity to achieve high social status for those who did not belong to the nobility...

Received Wisdom: The Use of Authority in Medieval Islamic Philosophy

AbstractIn this paper I challenge the notion that medieval philosophy was characterized by strict adherence to authority. In particular, I argue that to the contrary, self-consciously critical reflection on authority was a widespread intellectual virtue in the Islamic world. The contrary vice, called ‘taqlīd’, was considered appropriate only for those outside the scholarly elite. I further suggest that this idea was originally developed in the context of Islamic law and was then passed on to authors who worked within the philosophical tradition.

Egypt and Kush in Mesopotamian Chronicles

This article focuses on African-Mesopotamian relations in general and on how Egypt and Kush (in today’s Sudan) are represented in Mesopotamian chronicles specifically. Mesopotamian chronicles, which belong to a genre that focuses on historiography, contain references to Egypt and Kush in seven different chronicles dating to the Neo-Babylonian period and the Hellenistic period. The results of the study show that Egypt and Kush are not differentiated in the sources; that the references in question deal with military conflicts; and that Egypt appears both in positive and negative terms, thus standing in contrast to the propagandistic genre of Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. Even though Mesopotamian chronicles were primarily a matter for the scholarly elite, these texts provide one piece of the puzzle on how Egypt and Kush were regarded in ancient Mesopotamia.

The Inception of Armenian Grammatical Thought out of the Matrix of Hellenic Paideia

This article traces the evolution of grammatical study in Greater Armenia over the transition from the Late Antiqueto the early Medieval period (6th–9th cc.). It argues for the movement’s origins in a lay scholarly elite in contact with Alexandriathat conceived of its task as expanding the discipline through the judicial consideration of Armenian linguistic data. Diversefactors then led to the tradition’s embrace by the upper clergy and its subsequent inclusion into the curriculum of monasticschools in a Christianized version.

Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān: An Almohad Reading

ABSTRACT Ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 581/1185) connection with Almohad rulers and involvement in the Almohad doctrinal and intellectual project has been addressed by Nemesio Morata and Lawrence Conrad, among others. Conrad argues that Ibn Ṭufayl belonged to the newly created Almohad elites, the ṭalaba, the empire’s doctrinarians. Morata analyses the famous passage where Ibn Ṭufayl presents Ibn Rushd al-Ḥafīd (Averroes) to the then prince Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf – who would become the second Almohad caliph (r. 558/1163–580/1184) – when the young philosopher was commissioned to write his commentaries on Aristotle. Ibn Ṭufayl’s Risālat Ḥayy b. Yaqẓān has, however, rarely been analysed in the Almohad context in which it was written, despite being one of the earliest works written under Almohad rule. Here I propose precisely such a reading of the text, showing Sufism, philosophy and politics as inextricably linked. This proposal, with its specific identification of the two main characters of the Risāla, Ḥayy and Absāl, considers the needs that the new polity had at the time to develop a post-Messianic orientation that would preserve the loyalty of the first followers (Berber-speaking tribesmen from the Maghrib), while attracting the urbanized Andalusis and, more importantly, their scholarly elites.

The Chinese Tradition of Administrative Law

For most of the time during the last two millennia, China was a dynastic empire ruled by an emperor with the assistance of a highly developed mandarinate of imperial organs. “Administrative law” in the modern sense of a set of legal norms enacted by the legislature or developed by the judiciary that simultaneously empower and constrain state organs and officials for the purpose of protecting the rights and liberties of subjects or citizens did not exist in traditional China. But there did exist for more than two millenniums elaborate and sophisticated rules regulating the powers and functions of each component of the highly complex and extensive machinery of imperial organs and officials, and prescribing in detail the duties of officials as well as the multiple and complicated monitoring, supervisory and disciplinary mechanisms applicable to the exercise of powers and performance of duties by officials in different state organs. By the late 19th century, Qing China’s increasing subordination to Western imperialism and semi-colonialism convinced significant numbers of Chinese political and scholarly elite that there was a desperate need for China to “save” and strengthen itself by pursuing modernization. In the legal and political domains, this generally meant extensive borrowing or transplant of Western political and legal institutions. After China's defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, Japan’s experience of successful modernisation was widely admired by Chinese intellectuals, and the Japanese model was perceived as one that China should imitate in its self-strengthening efforts. This essay will therefore begin with the introduction and reception of Japanese administrative law in China in the late Qing Dynasty. It will then survey the study of comparative law and the influence of foreign law on the development of Chinese administrative law in the Republic of China era (1911–1949) and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (1949-). Major developments in Chinese administrative law in both the Republican era and the Communist era will also be briefly outlined as the context of administrative law scholarship. It will be seen that the story of the study of comparative and foreign administrative law in modern China is very closely intertwined with the story of the development of Chinese administrative law itself.

Enlightenment in the Name of Chinggis Khan: The Founding of the Eastern Mongolian Publishing House in Mukden 1926/27

Abstract This paper is devoted to one of the first commercial Mongolian publishing houses in Republican China, which was founded in Mukden in 1926/27 and existed until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. With its broad spectrum of publications, which included a textbook for primary education, translations and advices for self-improvement, its educational approach differed from earlier Mongolian publishing activities. Its founders saw themselves on a mission for education and aimed to spread knowledge relevant for Mongols in a globally connected world by making Mongolian language print material easier accessible to a wider public. The paper argues that the founders of the publishing house were fueled by ideas of social Darwinism and saw competition not only on a global scale but also within the Chinese Republic. For this reason, their publishing project was meant to strengthen Mongols as a distinct, unitary group within the multinational Chinese Republic. At the same time, they raised their own profile as cultural translators and presented themselves as a scholarly elite. The Mukden publishers tried to set themselves apart from the institutions, which had dominated the field of Mongolian book production so far, but made reference to familiar concepts of sponsoring in order to strengthen their arguments for commercial publishing.

Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds, by Dominic Sachsenmaier

<i>Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds</i>, by Dominic Sachsenmaier

Pressure to Publish Internationally: Scholarly Writing Coming to the Fore

JLE editors touch upon the trends and challenges arising out of the changing landscape of scholarly communication as well as two sets of major problems non-Anglophone researchers face in publishing their research in international English-language journals. Firstly, if not desk rejected, they encounter continuous revisions of their submissions to such journals. Secondly, English as lingua franca of international scholarly communication may lead to some disengagement of national scholarly elites who essentially publish in English and to a wider national scientific community decoupled from English and limited to their native language communication. Given the challenges, the editorial offers a refined and widened JLE scope regarding language- and education-related issues of scholarly written communication.

Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China by Yulian Wu

Reviewed by: Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China by Yulian Wu Jonathan Schlesinger Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China by Yulian Wu. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 295. $65.00 cloth, $65.00 e-book. How did objects shape Qing history, and how might studying objects inform the historian's craft? Drawing from art history, history of science, and new materialisms in critical theory, historians are showing how an object's materiality can inflect its production and circulation, how things provoke physical and affective responses in people, and how objects have a resulting power to act as agents in their own right.1 We must account for the animate and inanimate alike, then, in history, for both people and things are dynamic actors within mutually constituted networks.2 Learning to work with both textual and material sources thus pays scholarly dividends; it reveals the tacit limits of conventional, textual archives. Inspired by this outlook, Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China uncovers the "hidden history" (p. 3) that luxury objects in particular tell about Huizhou salt merchants in the high Qing period; it is a focused and illuminating analysis of the social roles and connections forged by the men who collected, exchanged, or otherwise interacted with luxury objects. Qing scholars often wrote of merchants as social inferiors, and modern historians [End Page 288] have followed suit, imagining merchants to be perpetually engaged in a "status negotiation" with scholarly elites (pp. 3, 12). Luxurious Networks takes the "status negotiation" paradigm to task, showing instead that a study of material things reveals multiple roles that merchants played as they navigated the Qing court, the Jiangnan marketplace, and their home villages in Huizhou. The book uses a rich array of sources, including palace memorials from the First Historical Archives of China, gazetteers, genealogies, and oral interviews conducted in the salt merchants' home villages. Like studies of ancient history that take inspiration from archaeology, however, Luxurious Networks resists privileging the textual over the material. Merchants, Wu argues, did not express themselves through texts; literati (shi 士) did. Rather, "merchants expressed themselves by doing things" (p. 7). Studying how merchants commissioned and consumed material objects, in turn, offers powerful insights into otherwise obscure subjectivities.3 Because salt was an imperial monopoly, the status of salt merchants was inseparable from the power of the court. Huizhou salt merchants first rose to prominence in the fifteenth century, when the Ming court licensed them to conduct salt trade in exchange for payments of silver.4 Later, in 1617, the Ming court institutionalized Huizhou merchants' power through a "hereditary franchise system" (gangfa 綱法), which fixed the number of licensed merchants in a given territory (pp. 32–33). The early Qing court adopted this hereditary franchise system after 1644, and Huizhou merchants maintained control over the empire's most lucrative salt markets: Liangzhe 兩浙 in Zhejiang and Jiangsu as well as Lianghuai 兩淮 in Hubei, Hunan, Henan, Anhui, and Jiangxi. Lianghuai in particular generated up to half of all salt revenue for the empire alone (pp. 33–37). The Huizhou merchants who controlled the Lianghuai trade, centered on Yangzhou, were thus especially important to the Qing court. [End Page 289] To understand salt merchants and their things, then, Wu begins with the relationships Huizhou merchants cultivated with the court. Qing rule, she argues, was like a trellis: "while the Manchu emperors and their officials ostensibly enforced their power through formal bureaucratic institutions, the complicated personal networks—growing like vines inside the system—allowed both the Manchu court and Jiangnan salt merchants to negotiate and pursue their own agendas" (p. 16). Two innovations formed the system's lattice. The first, institutionalized by the Kangxi 康熙 (r. 1661–1722) court, was the use of bondservants and bannermen as salt administrators (yanzheng 鹽政), which empowered the inner court to manage the salt trade (p. 38). The second was the use of salt merchants themselves to oversee production within a three-tier administration of merchant chiefs (dazong 大總 or shouzong 首總), head merchants (zongshang 總商), and small transport chiefs (sanshang 散商) (pp. 16, 48). Salt merchants were ideal agents of the state: their "wealth, broad social...

Field, Data, Access. Fieldwork among the Sámi from the Perspective of Assimilation and Ethnic Revitalization Processes

Abstract As a result of the Sámi ethnic revitalization process, not only is the right to practicing indigenous culture controlled by local communities today, but it is also heavily disputed who can access, use, perform, interpret, and shape their culture. Recently this debate has increasingly influenced academic discourse as well. By the last decades of the 20th century, the Sámi people, similarly to other indigenous peoples, contributed to ongoing scholarly activity with their own researchers. As a consequence of this, reservations as to external (foreign) rresearchers are more and more emphatically worded. Besides differences of the motivations and opportunities of “western” vs. “indigenous” science, epistemological problems also occur, due to varying world views and categories derived from differing practices of experiences, as well as to a scepticism as to the existence of authentic translation. In this way the relation of researcher and field site cannot be merely restricted to data collection and interpretation. Data processing, publication of findings and presentation of achievements for the scholarly elite of informants and the studied community are also of importance.

In Defense of Geomancy: Šaraf al-Dīn Yazdī Rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Critique of the Occult Sciences

Abstract The late 8th/14th century saw a renaissance of high occultism throughout Islamdom—a development alarming to puritan scholars. This includes Ibn Ḫaldūn (d. 808/1406), whose anti-occultist position in the Muqaddima is often assumed to be an example of his visionary empiricism; yet his goal is simply the recategorization of all occult sciences under the twin rubrics of magic and divination, and his veto persuades more on religious and social grounds than natural-scientific. Restoring the historian’s argument to its original state of debate with the burgeoning occultist movement associated with the Mamluk sultan Barqūq’s (r. 784/1382-791/1389 and 792/1390-801/1399) court reveals it to be not forward-thinking but rather conservative, fideist and indeed reactionary, as such closely allied with Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyya’s (d. 751/1350) puritanical project in particular; and in any event, the eager patronage and pursuit of the occult sciences by early modern ruling and scholarly elites suggests that his appeal could only fall on deaf ears. That it also flatly opposed the forms of millennial sovereignty that would define the post-Mongol era was equally disqualifying. I here take Šaraf al‑Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Ibn Ḫaldūn’s younger colleague and fellow resident in Cairo, as his sparring partner from the opposing camp: the Timurid historian was a card-carrying occultist and member of the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ network of neopythagorean-neoplatonic-monist thinkers then gaining prominence from India to Anatolia via Egypt. I further take geomancy (ʿilm al-raml) as a test case, since Yazdī wrote a tract in defense of the popular divinatory science that directly rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s arguments in the Muqaddima. To set the stage for their debate, I briefly introduce contemporary geomantic theory and practice, then discuss Ibn Ḫaldūn’s and Yazdī’s respective theories of occultism with a view toward establishing points of agreement and disagreement; I also append a translation of Yazdī’s tract as a basis for this comparison.

Kraj znany a państwo jeszcze nie. Rozważania o geografii wolnej Polski na łamach periodyków geograficznych II RP

Despite the partitions of Poland, the geography of the Polish territories was the object of studies carried out by Polish geographers, particularly in the latter half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. When in the years 1918-1923 the Polish state was rebuilt and its internationally recognised borders were formed, and physical geography of these lands had already been worked out in a rather thorough and up-to-date way. Th e geographers, historians, politicians and the administrative elite were confronted with the need to define the role of the Polish state and its place as a real political being and entity which its inhabitants would be conscious of. In response to this need a lively discussion was conducted in Polish geographical magazines of the interwar period. It was even more important since Polish authorities as well as the scholarly and intelectual elite had to solve the problem of unifying the lands and their inhabitants within one political organism. And yet, after above one hundred years of non-existance as a state, there were numerous differences between the particular previously annexed territories and their inhabitants. At the same time, the Polish nationality was common for about 70% of the population in this multinational country. A successful and definite solution of the issue of the state-awareness among the inhabitants of Poland, which was considered to be an object of geography and geographers’ practice, was not easy to be found because of fierce political disputes. In terms of quality, a new situation was created by the political consequences of the coup d’etat by Jozef Pilsudski in 1926. Th e winning party, which ruled with a heavey hand, continuously needed to take into account the power of their political opponents. Discussions and disputes, propositions and manifestos published in the interwar period indicated that the contemporary political and scholarly elite, regardless of the ideological matters, was aware of the necessity to consolidate the social conviction of the existance of the independant Polish state.

Al-Ḥājah al-‘Ilmiyyah ilā Mawsū‘ah Ḥadīthiah Mu‘āṣarah

This article presents a scientific project needed by Muslims more than many frequent encyclopedias of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The huge technological development in the search of information will help in citing the references of hadith in regard to the chain of narrators and the text of the hadith; and will help in working out the greater objective commonality of hadith and Quranic verses and at the lower level will help in developing the objectivity among the hadith. The proposed encyclopedia would be devised by the elite of scholars of fiqh and hadith so it can receive acceptance by the majority of Muslims, and it will carry the features of scientific methodology which are missing in the old and new collections of hadith.