Governing the Empire. Provincial Administration in the Almohad Caliphate (1224-1269): Critical Edition, Translation, and Study of Manuscript 4752 of the Ḥasaniyya Library in Rabat Containing 77 Taqādīm ("Appointments")

traduction anglaise Travis BruceGoverning Empire is a study, accompanied by a re-edition and a French translation, of maǧmūʿ Yaḥyá, the " compendium of Yaḥyá ", manuscript 4752 in the Library ḥasaniyya in Rabat. This little volume, the surviving copy of which dates from the 16th-17th centuries, reproduces a formulary composed in the late 13th century by Yaḥyá al-Ḫaḏūǧ, a man of letters living at the time of the demise of the Almohad Empire in 1269. It contains 77 acts of appointment of provincial officials, governors, military chiefs, chiefs of Arab tribes, tax-collectors and judges, written between 1224 and 1269. Of this total, 73 acts (two of them identical) concern the Almohad Empire, especially the Maghrebian part, and four concern the anti-Almohad principality of Ibn Hūd al-Mutawakkil of Murcia (r. 1228-1238) in the Iberian Peninsula. The acts reproduced by Yaḥyá belong to the highly codified genre of chancery literature. Written most frequently in rhyming prose (saǧʿ) and intended for proclamation in the great mosques of the Empire, they obey rules of composition and follow rhetorical, syntactical and linguistic procedures which place them --as the compiler asserts-- in the sphere of the adab, that is literature, or more generally the culture of the "man of good breeding". Partaking of poetry, sermon, oratory, normative literature and religious discourse, the appointments reproduced there are the expression of a sovereign order, the Almohad imperial order, or the anti-Almohad order of the Hūdi principality of Murcia. Set down in writing and rendered anonymous through the quasi-systematic deletion of proper names, toponyms and dates, these acts were neutralized for the use of successive specialists in the language of power. Performative as they were, they came to be accepted as models and thus were absorbed into the ever-growing thesaurus of reference texts. This pragmatic collection is the last vestige of the most important indigenous authority in the history of the Maghreb. Governing Empire begins by retracing the political history of the Almohad Empire and the stages through which a territory and an authority were built up. It recalls the ideological, political and religious foundations which made Ibn Tūmart possible to unify the Maghreb and al-Andalus in the mid-12th century in the service of a dynasty of Berber origin. ʿAbd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-1162) and his descendants, the Mu'minids, mobilised the strength of the tribes of the time, Berber and Arab, to impose a dogma devised by the greatest of contemporary thinkers. Living witnesses of the islamization and arabization of the Maghreb, this dynasty resolved to reorganize the structures of power and authority to its own advantage. The Almohad sovereigns, who had assumed the title of Caliph in consonance with their pretension to guide all the peoples of Islam (umma), in the manner of the Muʿtazilite in 9th-century Iraq, claimed for themselves the authority to interpret divine law. To that end, jurists and wise men were separated from the interpretative process that the Malikite school had reserved to them since the 9th century, and they were reduced to judicial tasks or enrolled in the chancery services. The literature that the chancery produced, of which the manuscript presented, re-edited and translated here is one of the fundamental examples, plainly reveals this reversal of the relationships of authority between the religious knowledge of the ulemas and the political power of the caliphs. The organization of the "compendium of Yaḥyá", which is presented in the second part, throws light on the original ideological concepts predominating at the close of the Almohad era: thus, military and fiscal functions, which belong to the political order --governors, army generals, admirals of the fleet and tax collectors-- are clearly set apart from the judicial functions pertaining to the judges. Law-making devolved upon the sovereign, the sole authorized interpreter of divine law as embodied in the Qur'an and Tradition. The task of creating positive law thus rested entirely with the Caliph-imām, heir to the founder of the Almohad movement, Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130) -- the guide inspired by God, "impeccable imām and acknowledged Mahdī". The tasks assigned to the appointed functionaries, the counsels and orders given them, and the instructions addressed to subjects, all clearly reflect the organic conception of society and of imperial authority that characterized the Almohad ideology. That ideology was revolutionary inasmuch as it clearly departed from functionalist approaches, like that implicit in the al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya wa l-Wilāyat al-Dīniyya ("The Ordinances of Government") of al-Māwardī (d. 1058). The careful edition and the French translation of Yaḥyá's formulary in the third part of Governing Empire give a good idea of the breadth of literary talent demanded of chancery secretaries, veritable craftsmen of language, simply to produce the decrees of power. The infinite stylistic and lexical variations combine adherence to rigid codes of chancery language with the kind of poetic and rhetorical innovations characteristic of great works of literature. This work on the language of power, at once laborious and skilled, bureaucratic and poetic, puts a voice to a specific authority --the authority of the Almohad caliphs, rooted in a particular time and place: the 13th-century Maghreb. The posthumous compilation of these performative utterances abstracts the language of power and sets Almohad history, dogma and order in the context of the corpus of timeless Islamic authorities. This formulary thus affords a glimpse of the specific nature of and the role played by administrative archives in the mediaeval Muslim world and throws light on the exceptional intricacy of Islamic imperial bureaucracies as exemplified by their chancery, the dīwān al-inšā', literally the "bureau of creation"

Discovery of a 66 mas Ultracool Binary with Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics

We present the discovery of 2MASS J21321145+1341584AB as a closely separated (0.066") very low-mass field dwarf binary resolved in the near-infrared by the Keck II Telescope using laser guide star adaptive optics. Physical association is deduced from the angular proximity of the components and constraints on their common proper motion. We have obtained a near-infrared spectrum of the binary and find that it is best described by an L5+/-0.5 primary and an L7.5+/-0.5 secondary. Model-dependent masses predict that the two components straddle the hydrogen burning limit threshold with the primary likely stellar and the secondary likely substellar. The properties of this sytem - close projected separation (1.8+/-0.3 AU) and near unity mass ratio - are consistent with previous results for very low-mass field binaries. The relatively short estimated orbital period of this system (~7-12 yr) makes it a good target for dynamical mass measurements. Interestingly, the system's angular separation is the tightest yet for any very low-mass binary published from a ground-based telescope and is the tightest binary discovered with laser guide star adaptive optics to date.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; accepted for publication to A

Cloning, sequencing, and characterization of the hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine degradation gene cluster from Rhodococcus rhodochrous

Hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine (RDX) is a high explosive which presents an environmental hazard as a major land and groundwater contaminant. Rhodococcus rhodochrous strain 11Y was isolated from explosive contaminated land and is capable of degrading RDX when provided as the sole source of nitrogen for growth. Products of RDX degradation in resting-cell incubations were analyzed and found to include nitrite, formaldehyde, and formate. No ammonium was excreted into the medium, and no dead-end metabolites were observed. The gene responsible for the degradation of RDX in strain 11Y is a constitutively expressed cytochrome P450-like gene, xpLA, which is found in a gene cluster with an adrenodoxin reductase homologue, xplB. The cytochrome P450 also has a flavodoxin domain at the N terminus. This study is the first to present a gene which has been identified as being responsible for RDX biodegradation. The mechanism of action of XplA on RDX is thought to involve initial denitration followed by spontaneous ring cleavage and mineralization

M-band Imaging of the HR 8799 Planetary System Using an Innovative LOCI-based Background Subtraction Technique

Multi-wavelength observations/spectroscopy of exoplanetary atmospheres are the basis of the emerging exciting field of comparative exoplanetology. The HR 8799 planetary system is an ideal laboratory to study our current knowledge gap between massive field brown dwarfs and the cold 5-Gyr old Solar system planets. The HR 8799 planets have so far been imaged at J- to L-band, with only upper limits available at M-band. We present here deep high-contrast Keck II adaptive optics M-band observations that show the imaging detection of 3 of the 4 currently known HR 8799 planets. Such detections were made possible due to the development of an innovative LOCI-based background subtraction scheme that is 3 times more efficient than a classical median background subtraction for Keck II AO data, representing a gain in telescope time of up to a factor of 9. These M-band detections extend the broad band photometric coverage out to about 5 microns and provide access to the strong CO fundamental absorption band at 4.5microns. The new M-band photometry shows that the HR 8799 planets are located near the L/T-type dwarf transition, similar to what was found by other studies. We also confirm that the best atmospheric fits are consistent with low surface gravity, dusty and non-equilibrium CO/CH4 chemistry models.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, accepted in ApJ

The International Deep Planet Survey II: The frequency of directly imaged giant exoplanets with stellar mass

Radial velocity and transit methods are effective for the study of short orbital period exoplanets but they hardly probe objects at large separations for which direct imaging can be used. We carried out the international deep planet survey of 292 young nearby stars to search for giant exoplanets and determine their frequency. We developed a pipeline for a uniform processing of all the data that we have recorded with NIRC2/Keck II, NIRI/Gemini North, NICI/Gemini South, and NACO/VLT for 14 years. The pipeline first applies cosmetic corrections and then reduces the speckle intensity to enhance the contrast in the images. The main result of the international deep planet survey is the discovery of the HR 8799 exoplanets. We also detected 59 visual multiple systems including 16 new binary stars and 2 new triple stellar systems, as well as 2,279 point-like sources. We used Monte Carlo simulations and the Bayesian theorem to determine that 1.05[+2.80-0.70]% of stars harbor at least one giant planet between 0.5 and 14M_J and between 20 and 300 AU. This result is obtained assuming uniform distributions of planet masses and semi-major axes. If we consider power law distributions as measured for close-in planets instead, the derived frequency is 2.30[+5.95-1.55]%, recalling the strong impact of assumptions on Monte Carlo output distributions. We also find no evidence that the derived frequency depends on the mass of the hosting star, whereas it does for close-in planets. The international deep planet survey provides a database of confirmed background sources that may be useful for other exoplanet direct imaging surveys. It also puts new constraints on the number of stars with at least one giant planet reducing by a factor of two the frequencies derived by almost all previous works.Comment: 83 pages, 13 figures, 15 Tables, accepted in A&

Experimental validation of CFD hydrodynamic models for catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP)

Catalytic Fast Pyrolysis (CFP) is a means of producing renewable fuels and chemicals from lignocellulosic biomass. KiOR, a world leader in this area, has developed a CFP technology along the lines of the FCC process. In early 2015, KiOR engaged with CPFD Software to develop a new, parallel path for developing and optimizing its CFP technology. Emphasis was placed on hydrodynamics predictions, since that is one key area where KiOR’s CFP differs significantly from FCC. The KiOR-CPFD team reduced the hydrodynamics validation problem to four key milestones. Each milestone needs independent experimental validation, and must build on the previous ones: Fixed-fluid-bed (FFB) fluidization of catalyst only; FFB mixing of catalyst and biomass; Circulating-fluid-bed (CFB) fluidization & de-fluidization of catalyst only; CFB mixing of catalyst and biomass. At the time of this writing, the first two milestones are essentially complete, and the results published (1,2). All efforts are now focused on milestone 3. To this end, a simple lab-scale cold-flow CFB unit has been constructed (Figure 1) that provides for detailed study of important phenomena in circulating systems, like: pneumatic transport; choke point; defluidization and bed-building; powder flow; bubbling and jetting; and transport disengagement height (TDH). This new cold-flow unit can circulate catalyst through test chambers of varying sizes and shapes, over wide ranges of catalyst and gas flows. Existing measurement capabilities include mass holdup, pressure profile, and visual observations. Figure 2 shows the very first data ever produced by this unit, compared to CFD predictions. Mass holdups were measured gravimetrically, using the isolation valves. These tests already prove the unit is up to the challenge of providing the necessary validation data, with all the discrimination and repeatability needed for CFD model tuning. At this early stage, it appears the CFD predictions are high by roughly a factor of 2. It also seems some fine structure is missing from the predictions. Note that at present, we do not have gas flow capability to explore the sharp drop seen in the CFP predictions. There is much more to come! Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Detection of Carbon Monoxide and Water Absorption Lines in an Exoplanet Atmosphere

Determining the atmospheric structure and chemical composition of an exoplanet remains a formidable goal. Fortunately, advancements in the study of exoplanets and their atmospheres have come in the form of direct imaging - spatially resolving the planet from its parent star - which enables high-resolution spectroscopy of self-luminous planets in Jovian-like orbits. Here, we present a spectrum with numerous, well-resolved, molecular lines from both water and carbon monoxide from a massive planet orbiting less than 40 AU from the star HR 8799. These data reveal the planet's chemical composition, atmospheric structure, and surface gravity, confirming that it is indeed a young planet. The spectral lines suggest an atmospheric carbon-to-oxygn ratio greater than the host star's, providing hints about the planet's formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Science. Published online on March 14, 2013. 24 pages (main text and supplementary materials), 8 figures. Attachments to the supplementary material are available on Science websit