There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called 'iḇrīm already in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whether yәhūḏīṯ ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.), śәṗaṯ kәna'an ‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and 'iḇrīṯ ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.

A “contextualist” reading of the Quran is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among those Muslims referred to as “progressive-ijtihadis”. One of the primary concerns of this reading is that in order to understand and interpret the ethico-legal content of the Quran and relate that content to the changing needs and circumstances of Muslims today, it is important to approach the text at different levels, giving a high degree of emphasis to the socio-historical context of the text. In the classical tafsīr this emphasis on socio-historical context was not considered important, particularly in the interpretation of the ethico-legal texts, despite the frequent use of asbāb al-nuzūl literature. In this paper, I will explore how progressive-ijtihadis are adopting a contextualist reading of ethico-legal texts of the Quran. To illustrate this, I will use one or two such texts (verses) and their interpretations by the progressive-ijtihadis and will seek to demonstrate the contours of this approach, and highlight some of the challenges this approach is facing.

The Arabic manuscript which forms a part of Majmū‘ No. 17, preserved in the ຒahirīya Library in Damascus, is the only fragment extant of a diary kept during the fifth/eleventh century by a contemporary historian of Baghdad, Abū ’Alī b. al-Bannā’ al-Ḥanbalī. An edition and translation of this fragment (hereafter referred to as the Diary) are given here for the first time. It covers in some detail a period of slightly more than one year, from A.H. 460 to A.H. 461 (corresponding to A.D. 1068–69), in the socio-religious history of Baghdad.

The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical centre and a non-prototypical periphery; and (b) primary emotive interjections exhibit the highest degree of canonicity and extra-systematicity, while the canonicity and extra-systematicity of secondary phatic interjections is lowest.

The domain of h- and q- which are prosodic features is stated in this paper to be the radical and its immediate extensions and affixes: for example, *h(edide), eating, is phonetically elile, and *q(edade), sleeping, is phonetically date. But as in other Akan languages, especially Twi, h- and q- may prove in Nzema also to be a feature of larger pieces.

In the course of a recently published article, I had occasion to demonstrate, rather briefly and using a comparatively simple poem, what seemed to me a distinct pattern of symbolic allusion in the verse of Ḥāfiẓ. I suggested that this type of pattern (especially in association with certain others, which have recently engaged the attention of scholars) largely invalidated the traditional view of Persian poetry as a random shower of brilliant, but ill-assorted and uncontrolled, ‘fireworks’.

One of the major political and social results of the Ottoman Tanzimat in Syria and Palestine during the nineteenth century was the transformation whichit wrought upon the form of rule in the towns. The era of Turkish reform notonly gave a new shape and a different content to the struggle for authorityin the Syrian city between the Ottoman government and the local forces; italso contributed largely to the crystallization and consolidation of the urbanleadership of ‘ulamā’ and a'yan, by the establishment of local councils (Majlis)in the towns, which formed the main basis of future municipal life and autonomyin the area. The internal strife in the Syrian town, although acquiring a differentcharacter during the Tanzimat period, had its roots in the pre-reform era, whena fierce contest for power took place in many cities between various forces, of which the Turkish Pasha was only one. In the eighteenth century feudsoccurred in the big cities, either between the rival Janissary units, or betweenthem and the Ashrāf militia, the descendants of the Prophet. The Pashas withtheir own forces also took part in this struggle, usually siding with one factionand seeking to establish their control.1 Involved also in this struggle were thelocal ‘iulamā’, in whose hands was the administration of justice, and the a'yān, who controlled the civil administration in the towns.2

The question under discussion here is both perplexing and easy, a paradox arising from the scarcity of precisely datable Sung bronzes. Because of the scarcity of such bronzes, art historians have not succeeded in forming a definite view about their quality, casting, and designs; however, it may be possible for specialists in other fields to say something about them. Unfortunately, records, too, are scanty. Under such circumstances, we may be justified in resorting to exogenous, namely economic, factors in the hope of finding an acceptable provisional conclusion.

The Arab Empire of the Umayyad Period is still one of the problems of history. Muslim historians, in spite of their theological prejudice against the reigning house, display a not unnatural undercurrent of pride in its triumphs of conquest. European historians of the period fall into two classes: those who regard the Empire as an organized system of government, carrying on and blending the Roman and Persian traditions, and those who see in it an organized system of exploitation, copying the older administrations only so far as they ministered to the rapacity of the conquerors.

The inscription recently found in the Negev (see Y. D. Nevo, ‘A new Negev Arabic inscription’, p. 18 above) mentions one Hakim b. Abī Asmā', a mawlā of ‘Abdallāh b. 'Amr b. al-‘Āṣ. No reference to a person called Ḣakīm b. Abī Asmā could be found in any other source, literary or archaeological, for the early Islamic period. His master, ‘Abdallāh b. ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ, is presumably the famous scholar, son of the conqueror of Palestine and Egypt, who was from the Quraysh clan of Banū Sahm. There is a considerable amount of evidence linking both father and son to Palestine

IN representing the vowels of the Isaaq dialect of Somali2 we meet with many difficulties not only because of a large number of vowel distinctions but also on account of the operation of Vowel Harmony. I use the term Vowel Harmony in the same sense as Armstrong,3 i.e. as the harmony (or ‘matching’) of vowels belonging to the same series. Schleicher,4 Reinisch,5 and Abraham6 use this term quite differently, meaning by it certain types of assimilation of vowels without postulating two vowel series. Armstrong was the first writer in the literature on Somali to become aware of the existence and complexity of the problems under discussion.

Idrisi's great geographical encyclopædia, Nuzhat al-muŠtāq al-āfāq, compiled in A.D. 1153 for King Roger II of Sicily, is formally arranged according to the seven Ptolemaic climates, each divided into ten “sections” numbered from west to east. In this arrangement, Ireland occupies the first section of the seventh climate, and Great Britain the second. Since Tuulio's publication of the third to fifth sections of this climate, it seems time that a comprehensive treatment should be attempted of the preceding two sections. Jaubert's pioneer French translation contains many attempts at identification of the place-names mentioned, which are not uniformly successful. Miller's Mappæ Arabicæ represents a considerable advance in this respect, but his identifications are not in every case acceptable, and even where correct they deserve some justificatory comment. In the following pages I have attempted to give all necessary comments, and to suggest some identifications which I believe to be an improvement on those hitherto proposed. I must express my grateful thanks to the Conservateur du Cabinet des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and to the India Office Librarian in London, for the facilities which they have afforded me of consulting the manuscripts in those places; to Dr. W. B. Stevenson for generously allowing me to see the typescript of his article on Idrisi's map of Scotland before publication; to Professor I. Y. Krachkovskii and the Director of the Publichnaya Biblioteka for assisting me to obtain photographs of the Leningrad manuscript; and to Professor H. A. R. Gibb for some very helpful suggestions.

The beginnings of history writing in Islam were cultivated in two centres—Medina, representing Islamic interests and primarily concerned with the Sīra (Life of the Prophet) and the early history of Islam, and Irāq—more specifically Kūfa and Basra—representing tribal interests and lines of historical studies. These beginnings were collective pursuits, individual activity being a part of a school and adding further to its development.

Tracing the migration of Muslims from India to South Africa's Natal colony in the late nineteenth century, the article focuses on the missionary activities of Ghulām Muhammad “Sūfī Sāhib” (d. 1329/1911). Placing Ghulām Muhammad in a new religious marketplace of competing religions, and versions thereof, the article examines the strategies through which he successfully established his form of Islam among Natal's indentured and merchant Muslim classes and used the fabric of religion to bind together a distinctly “Muslim” community from the heterogeneous individuals and groups brought from India by commerce and the plantation economy. As a founder of shrines no less than madrasas, Ghulām Muhammad demonstrated the ways in which a customary Islam of holy men, festivities and hagiographies flourished and responded to the demands and opportunities of modernity. Building on the popular appeal of customary piety, Ghulām Muhammad consolidated his success by providing a range of social services (education, healthcare, burial) for the Indian poor of Natal, to create an effective public platform for the norms of Sharia in South Africa.

With few exceptions, scholarly presentations of the Ibāḍī “stages of religion” (masālik al-dīn) and their corresponding Imāms (i.e. imām al-ẓuhūr, imām al-difāʿ, imām al-shirā', and imām al-kitmān) propose a simplified overview of the institution that is based on post-Ibāḍī renaissance thought on the Imāmate. This paper investigates the pre-renaissance usages of the masālik al-dīn by comparing sixth/twelfth-century Arabian and North African Ibāḍī texts on the subject. It demonstrates that Eastern and Western Ibāḍīs manipulated the concepts central to the later masālik al-dīn ideal to reflect the particular needs of each respective community. While the articulations of the masālik al-dīn differed according to region, they simultaneously utilized a similar vocabulary. This convergence implies an earlier and inherited conceptual system (most likely from the earliest Basran Ibāḍī umma) that was adapted in the medieval period to fulfil the unique needs of each community.

It is now a century since the publication of Reinisch’s Chamirsprache, which has remained irtually the only source of information we have on this Agaw lanhuage to date. As a result of his acquaintance with a native speaker from Soqota(Säk’wät ’a), whist working in Massawa on his study of Bilin, the northernmost agaw language, Reinisch was able to collect enough information to mproduce a reasonable descripiton of the language. He himself neer had the opporunity to work on chamir in its home environment and was forced to curtail his studies of the language when his informant was obliged to leave Massawa. After the publication of Die Chamirsprache in 1884, no new information on the language until Conti Rossini’s brief description of Khamta was published in 1904, twenty years later. The dialect he recorded is material, though scanty, contains a number of very interesting features, both phonemis and morphological: for example, he cites the only known instance of prefix conjugating erds in Agaw outside Awngi, the southernmost and most divergent mermber of the group. Unfortunately his morphological description is all too cursory and does not permit a proper analysis of this highly idiosyncratic dialect. It may well be that Conti Rossini’s Khamta should be regarded as a separate language from Reinisch’ Chamie, or the Khamtanga dialect presented here. I shall have occasion to return briefly to this question below.

In his pioneer work on the Burushaski language, Lorimer (1935a:64) noted the existence of what has been later described as an ergative construction: the subject of a transitive verb is in the ergative case (a special case, usually marked by the suffix-e) while the subject of inttransitive verbs, as well as the object of transitive verbs, are in the absolutive case (morphologically unmarked) as appears in the examples 1(a)-(c) below:

In the new activity of qānūn-making at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Egypt preceded Turkey, especially with regard to criminal law. Although Egypt was still part of the Ottoman Empire, Muḥammad ‘Alī framed new laws based on Egyptian conditions and valid in Egypt only, while the Ottoman laws of the Tanzimat did not come into force in Egypt before Sa‘īd's days. The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of Egyptian penal laws in the nineteenth century, to analyse their relation to Ottoman laws, and to relate the story of the Ottoman Sultan's attempt to introduce into Egypt ‘the Tanzimat’—meaning mainly the Ottoman penal code.

STEIN MS. Ch. 00269 is a report by haḍa (”), who call themselves ñaśa bīsa (“ humble servants”), on behalf of seven rispura (“ princes ”). It consists of 120 lines, but of that a considerable part cannot yet be translated. The report is concerned with the cities of Ṣacū and Kaṃmicū. Danger from robbers is reported and an investment of the city of Kaṃmicū, so that food and cattle are lacking.

The tercentenary year of the second siege of Vienna by the Turks has seen the first-fruits of a long-planned venture, the publication in full of the Ottoman documents preserved in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. This first part presents, in facsimile and with full transcription and translation, the texts of 36 documents issued in the name of Süleymān the Magnificent (1520–66), one being addressed to Charles V as ‘King of Spain’, 28 to Ferdinand I as ‘King of Austria’ and later as Emperor, and seven to Ferdinand's son and successor, the Emperor Maximilian. The earliest, a remarkably splendid fragment, is the beginning of a fetḥnāme, probably sent from Baghdad in December 1534 to report victories in Persia to Ferdinand as being (ostensibly) a friendly neighbour after the conclusion of peace the previous year; nos. 2–8 relate to negotiations during the war-years 1541–7; nos. 9–15, mainly recriminations over frontier skirmishes but with another fine fetḥnāme (no. 11) of 1549, belong to the brief period of uneasy peace; nos. 16–27 concern peace-feelers and embassies during the war-years 1551–62, no. 25 being the 'ahdnāme; a main topic of the remainder is the tribute, while no. 32 is the renewal of the 'ahdnāme of 1562 in favour of the new emperor Maximilian.