An argument can be put forward that human belief is one of the major motivations behind the creation and shaping of the human built environment. When a society, authority, or individuals adopt a specific belief or ideology or even change their original belief, this will be reflected in their social pattern and then in their built environment. These have been replaced by other materialistic values and beliefs. Social values and human beliefs in the contemporary built environment have been misinterpreted, misunderstood, and mostly ignored by decision makers, planners, and urban designers. This thesis tries to relates this argument to Muslim society, believing that Islam is the main motivation behind their built environment. As long as Muslims perceive Islam as a way of life, their built environment will reflect this belief. So, the main hypothesis of the thesis is that the traditional Muslim city mainly reflected Islamic belief. When Muslim societies and authorities started to adopt or combine other beliefs and ideologies into their Islamic belief, the society started to reflect these new ideologies in their way of life. This, in turn, influenced their built environment. Alien ideologies started to take place within the Muslim society which were based on totally different ways of life and cultural values. The consequences of these ideologies started to appear during the process of growth and transformation of Muslim cities from the nineteenth century, with affects likely to continue for several generations. In order to examine this hypothesis, the thesis studies the relationship between the house and the mosque within Muslim city.

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The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the commonly held prohibition of alcohol did not prevent some members of the Muslim community from consuming intoxicating drinks. Specifically, this thesis will examine the consumption of wine in the Islamic world from the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570 CE) through the end of the reign of al-Ma'mun (218/833). Chapter 1 presents an overview of the presence and consumption of wine prior to the birth of Muhammad. It will be demonstrated that wine was a social and sometimes religious norm within the dominions that Islam was to dominate within a generation after Muhammad's death. Chapter 2 explores the prohibition of wine itself as revealed in the Qur'an and portrayed in literature. Chapter 3 examines the reigns of the <I>Rashidun </I>Caliphs and their efforts to come to terms with some parts of the community that were unwilling to cease drinking all forms of wine. Chapter 4 details evidence of continued wine consumption in the Umayyad Era and Chapter 5 similarly for the 'Abbasid era with an overview of the development of the law with respect to the use of wine.

This work is intended as an exploration and development in a Buddhist context of a previously neglected area in the study of sacred texts, identified by William Graham as "the sensual dimension", or the response of a community to its sacred texts. The focus of the study is the Dhammapada Commentary, a Pli narrative text. As a genre of religious literature, narrative has either been over-emphasised or disregarded by scholars in the study of sacred texts. The thesis presented is that the Dhammapada Commentary can be examined, utilising a narrative theory formulated by Ian Reid, which involves the analysis of the way texts are framed by readers. Four areas are explored, including the form of text's presentation, the particular preoccupations revealed in the text and brought to the text, the structure of text as commentary and how the text is seen in relation to other texts. Of particular significance are the preoccupations displayed in the text and the emphasis in the text on evoking a particular response to the text, through which the text is aligned intertextually with an already established mode of response. The implications of this, particularly for the nature of the relationship between canon and commentary, are also considered.

The thesis provides an ethnographic and anthropological account of Tibetan Buddhist ritual and monasticism in Lingshed village in Ladakh, North-West India. Two fundamental issues are addressed: firstly, the nature and form of religious and ritual care provided by the monks of Lingshed monastery to those villages in its vicinity which act as its patrons; secondly, the structure and ideology of Tibetan Buddhist notions and practices relating to ritual and religious authority, especially those of the Gelukpa Order of Tibetan Buddhism, of which Lingshed monastery is a part. Addressing the relationship between local understandings of the purposes and methods of Buddhism, the thesis presents a microscopic analysis of the relationship between ritual practice and indigenous notions concerning the person as ritual actor and the nature of divinity in Tantric Buddhism. It therefore includes an in-depth discussion of a series of ritual practices essential to Tibetan Buddhism in general, and to the monastery at Lingshed in particular, including rites to protector divinities and methods for cleansing ritual pollution. The work particularly highlights the practice of <I>sangs-sol</I>, that is offerings to local divinities, as performed by monastic personnel. As part of characterising the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhism, the thesis discusses two dominant modes of religious and spiritual renunciation: clerical and tantric. The first of these two modes characterises the celibate monastic career of most members of the Gelukpa Order, whilst the second, tantric renunciation, refers to the employment of highly complex ritual techniques aimed at consubstantiating the practitioner with certain tantric deities. Since this latter method classically involves the use of sexual yoga, the thesis explores the manner in which such methods have been integrated into the strict celibate monasticism of the Gelukpa Order. The conclusion arising from this is that, the tension between tantric method and monasticism centres real ritual authority within the Gelukpa Order (and other forms of monastic Buddhism in Tibetan areas) onto a select group of 'incarnate lamas', who are therefore essential to the continued survival of the tradition.

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The Chinese Buddhist temple has been frequently discussed on a secular level, that is to say, in terms of its stylistic development, the details of its aesthetic, its socio-economic context, and so on. But the temple also has a metaphysical relationship with its transcendent source which has largely been ignored by recent literature. This thesis aims therefore to unveil this metaphysical connection between the physical reality of the temple and its transcendent origin: the religious symbolism which cannot be perceived except by the tutored mind. In this symbolic schema, the Chinese Buddhist temple is regarded as a microcosm which allows the devotee to communicate with the higher level, and is the sacred place where Heaven and Earth, the sacred and profane worlds, are connected. It is the locus of the <I>axis mundi</I>, a vertical channel through which two complementary forces - the proliferative centrifugal and the unifying centripetal - are made manifest. As this thesis explains, at the heart of this perception of the temple are the doctrines of Progenitive Centre and Ultimate Return. In the former, the Centre is denoted as the source of the universe from which originates the whole phenomenal existence of the world, including the embodiment of space and time, and the myriads of beings; in the latter, the salvation of sentient beings is said to lie in embarkation on a spiritual journey, which ultimately culminates in a "return" to the Centre. Informed by these doctrinal formulations, the Chinese Buddhist temple is an ideal paradigm of these cosmic processes, which, in architectural terms, are embedded deep within its spatial organisation and outward form - its orientation and axiality, the form of its individual buildings, and its iconography.

Muslim legal theorists develop a very sophisticated model of textual communication. This model is based on four main pillars: establishment, use, interpretation and signification. This thesis aims to formulate and explore this model. Chapter I offers a general background about the topic. Chapter II deals with the distinction between establishment, which concerns language as a given lexicon and grammatical patterns, and use, which concerns the speakers' behaviour. My focus is to discuss how each utterance, as legal theorists suggest, pertains partly to establishment and partly to use. This is taken up through the discussion of universal and particular establishment, general and specific establishment, use, intention and context. Chapter III examines the distinction between <I>fiqh</I>, understanding and interpretation and discusses context from the addressee's point of view. An account of the mainstream model of interpretation is provided <I>via</I> examining five communicative principles. Chapter IV includes a formulation of what I call 'Ibn Taymiyyah's contextual theory of interpretation', which represents the <I>salafis'</I> account of interpretation. My formulation of this theory displays its coherence by delving into its underlying philosophical principles. This involves relating it to his relevant ontological, epistemological and theological outlook. Besides, the inquiry includes his theory of cognitive relativism, his contextual theory of definition and his views on language, meaningfulness, the establishment-use dichotomy, meaning-intention distinction and signification. More important is his critical view of the distinction between literal and non-literal meaning, and his model of interpretation. Chapter V is concerned with two significational classifications: a semiotic classification and a text-based classification.

This investigation had two main aims: a) to determine the nature of the original text of the Palestinian targum and its probable date of composition; b) to elucidate the present textual situation, the relationship of the extant manuscripts and their relative value. Very little evidence supports the widely-accepted pre-Christian date of composition. Oral Aramaic translations are first spoken of in the late second century AD. There is no evidence for the existence of the Palestinian targum - or any standard translation other than the Greek - before the late third century at the earliest. The original text did not contain many (if any) of the interpolated commentaries and stories found in the late manuscripts. The language is 'translation Aramaic' but is basically that of fourth to sixth century Galilee, although some features (particularly orthography) resemble those in earlier works. Some features of the syntax are explicable only if we assume that the translation was made not from the Hebrew but from a Greek version. The best text is to be found in Manuscripts A and E of the Cairo Geniza : the distinctive readings of this latter text are also to be found - amongst others - in the margin of Neofiti I. The later manuscripts B and F of the Cairo Geniza, Vatican 440 and Leipzig I witness to the same text, but show influence from the Targum Onkelos and have much more added material. Manuscript C is a less reliable member of the same group. Manuscript D and Neofiti I have suffered (probably independently) considerable revision which has removed much of the original features; and have acquired much additional matter. The text of Neofiti I is substantially the one quoted by R. Nathan (c. 1100 AD). The margin of Neofiti I may have two alternatives to words in the translation and up to three alternate versions of the interpolated material. One set of these variants shows frequent agreement with Pseudo-Jonathan and the Talmudic literature.

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