Alberti was possibly in Rome by 1431; Mancini speculates by 1428. The Curia employed composers and authors and editors of papal bulls, and Alberti was employed as such. Recreated in visual topography by Poggio and Flavio, Rome’s surviving monuments would advance Alberti’s dynamic visual encounters. Giotto’s and Cavallini’s formative works in Rome further endowed the spatial avant-garde in the city of Gentile, Pisano, Masaccio, Masolino, Ghiberti, and Donatello. The textual and visual gifts gleaned from Padua, Bologna, and northern Europe would evolve into Rome’s validation of all prescriptions in De pictura.

• Psychoactive drug use can cause physical, psychological and social harm.

• Drug-related harm depends on factors related to the drug and factors related to the person taking the drug.

• Drug-related factors include the type of drug, how it is used, the amount taken and the length of use.

• Person-related factors include genetic make-up as well as mental, physical and social health.

• Drug use can be broadly classified as recreational use, harmful use or dependence.

• For some people, the risk of drug dependence results from faulty brain functioning.

• Understanding patterns of harm helps clinicians decide if treatment is needed and, if so, which treatment is most likely to help.

• Some behaviour, such as gambling, can cause brain changes similar to those seen in drug dependence.

Chai and Islam

On a cold Thursday evening in January 2023, I accompanied a friend to the Shah Farid graveyard in the Sabzazar Housing Scheme. Located on the western edge of Lahore, right off Multan Road, which is the main traffic artery in this part of the city, Sabzazar is a dense mix of planned middle-class housing, expanding commercial markets, and pockets of working-class neighborhoods. The Shah Farid graveyard takes its name from the eponymous saint entombed here, whose glittering shrine hovers over the area. However, we were not here to visit this shrine but were looking for Sakina Bibi, an acquaintance of my friend, who had invited us to spend the evening with her sangat. Even before we had alighted from our car, we spotted her waving and gesturing toward us. After exchanging warm greetings, Sakina beckoned us to follow her to the baithak of her saint, Syed Shabbir Shah. This was a narrow clearing between graves in a section of this graveyard where a group of men were seated close to a fire. Sakina proudly informed us that this was the place where her Qalandari sarkar, Shabbir Shah, spent many years when he was alive. While his actual grave and tomb are in another part of the city, his local followers had carved out a small space around a replica grave, which they claimed to be imbued with his sacred presence.

A few minutes after I had paid my respects to the saint by bowing and touching this “grave,” I found myself comfortably seated next to the fire, using a grave as a backrest. Sakina proudly introduced the four men present here as members of her Qalandari sangat and fellow devotees of Syed Shabbir Shah. I also noticed another small group of men a few feet away, who all seemed younger and were seated in a row in a narrow crevice between another set of graves. Initially I was under the impression that Pannu, who was seated right across from me, was the leader of this gathering as the others were showing him some deference.

Introduction

In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.

While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.