I suppose that most textbooks of European history or of world history—which in European textbooks is much the same thing—contain a chapter called ‘The Age of the Discoveries’, or something of the kind, which deals with the period from the fifteenth century onwards when Western Europe set about discovering the rest of the world. My subject to-day is another and earlier discovery, in which the West European was not the explorer going forth to discover the barbarian, but the barbarian discovered by the explorer—the Muslim explorer. My purpose is to outline, very briefly, the sources, nature, and stages of growth of Muslim knowledge concerning Western Europe, first in the obscure centuries before the Crusades, then during that great offensive of Western Christendom against Islam, of which the expeditions to Palestine were the easternmost expression.

The Niya Documents are a collection of some 760 or so texts, on wood, paper, leather, silk, etc., which were found (primarily) by Sir Aurel Stein in his Central Asian expeditions of 1900–01, 1906 07, 1913–14, at several ruined sites around Niya on the southern Silk Route. They are short texts, ranging from sentence fragments and brief lists to well-preserved connected texts of up to long lines, and they contain administrative records (deeds, bills of sale, etc.) and administrative correspondence (about criminal and civil complaints, tax collection, governmental management, and dangers from without) of the kingdom of Shan-Shan or Kroraina. One of their remarkable features to an indologist is that they are more or less securely datable, to a period of approximately 90 years in the third century A.D.

Al-Malik al-Mansūr Husām al-Dīn Lāchin al-Manṣsūrī was one of the succession of sultans whose brief reigns occupy the two decades from the death of al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn in 689/1290 to the third accession of his son, al-Nāsir Muhammad, 709/1310. Lāchīn himself reigned little more than two years; his sultanate ended as it had begun in conspiracy and it was distinguished by no outstanding successes. Nevertheless it has some features of significance for the history of the Mamlūk sultanate.

The many thousands of inscriptions conventionally classified under the headings of Dedanite, Lihyanite, Safaitic, and Thamudic, all share the characteristic of a definite article in the form h- or hn-. Pre-Islamic texts displaying the distinctively Arabic article al are a mere handful; among them, easily the most important is the funerary text of Umru' al-Qays at Nemara (RES 483). This very minuscule corpus has recently been enlarged by two inscriptions from Qaryat al-Faw (anciently Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil; near modern Sulayyil, on the trade route linking Nagrān with the eastern Arabian coast), publicized by Dr. Abdul Rahman al-Ansary in spring 1977 at the first International Symposium on Studies in the History of Arabia at Riyadh. These texts are particularly welcome in that they are written in fine monumental South Arabian script, and thus do not pose the acute problems of reading occasioned by the exceedingly ambiguous scripts of Nemara and the other northern texts.

One of the several branches of Islamic law in which practice diverged most sharply from theory was the law of commerce. The divergence is especially striking in two respects: regular imposition of taxes regarded by the shariī‘a as illegal, and reliance upon written documents as legal proof of transactions for which juridical theory demanded only oral evidence of witnesses. A third problematical aspect of commercial law was the juridical status of the non-Muslim merchant in Dār al-Islām. Matters pertaining thereto were loosely subsumed by the jurists under the term amān, associated specifically with the law of war, and defined by recourse to as much precedent as could be gleaned from the Qur'ān and from the example of the Prophet and of the earliest Muslim communities. The consequences of this procedure have posed several historical problems upon which it is hoped the present paper will throw some light.

It is obvious to anyone who reads Lao Tzǔ that opposites play a prominentpart in it. There is hardly a page on which one cannot find some contrasted terms like ‘ long ’ and short', ‘ weak’ and ‘ strong ’. What may not be soobvious is the complexity of the different theories concerning these opposites.It is thepurpose of this paper to study, in some detail, these theories.

Arabic manuscript no. 4525 in the Istanbul University Library consists of what appears to be the first part of a history of Safed. The manuscript bears no indication either of the title of the work or of the name of its author. The text begins on the second page; the first contains only a brief quotation on Safed from the Mu‘jam al-buldān of Yāqūt.

This article deals with Palestinian Christians and Jews who availed themselves of the Muslim pious endowment institution (waqf, pi. awqāf) during the late Ottoman period. In Judaism and Christianity we find pious endowment institutions: the Jewish ‘Hekdesh’ and the Christian ‘Piae Causae’. In both religions there exists an ancient tradition of endowments for purposes which are quite similar to those of the waqf. In spite of this, Christians and Jews in Muslim territories availed themselves of the waqf from the Middle Ages until the end of the Ottoman state. This is an example of the use by minorities of the majority's legal system.

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook take an extreme stand in their study of early Islam when they dismiss Islamic Egypt as an utterly depersonalized and assimilated part of the orthodox Muslim polity. ‘Egypt in Islam was not so much a nation or even a country as simply a place.’ In their view the Copts with their indigenous traditions and civilization had become exiles in their own country. Rustic Coptic culture, if compared with the urban Christian intellectual heritage of Syria and Mesopotamia, lacked the stamina to assert itself in. the new religious setting, and receded to the countryside. In the opinion of the authors, Egypt surrendered with extreme readiness her distinctive provincial features to the new Islamic civilization and developed into the most loyal and most prolific, yet at the same time the most parochial and imitative stronghold of sunnī Islam. They flatly disclaim any specific Egyptian contribution to medieval Islam, even during the two centuries of schismatic Fatimid ascendancy when Cairo was the centre of an intrinsically Egyptian Empire with universal claims. So far the thesis of Hagarism.

During all periods of Islamic history, subjects with a grievance were free to address petitions to the ruler, one of whose traditional functions was to remedy injustice personally (al-naẓar fi'l-maẓālim). From Egypt we have a series of extant petitions from the Middle Ages. The practice of the Fāṭimids has been described in the detailed commentary accompanying my edition of three petitions from the time of that dynasty; the information which can be derived from the documents is there completed by accounts in literary sources. Here I publish all those petitions from the Ayyūbid period which are known to me. In another study I hope to perform the task carried out for the Fāṭimid period for the Mamlūk period also, comparing the detailed statements of the historians with the extant documents. For the Ayyūbid period there are no detailed descriptions of the procedure followed in submitting petitions, and the little which is known will be set out in the course of our discussion.

An essential part of the prosodic approach is the abstraction of those features that may be regarded as syntagmatic. One feature of this kind is ‘vowel harmony’; prosodic analysis is well equipped to deal with this in terms of x2018;frontness’ and ‘backness’, or ‘openness’ and ‘closeness’, these being treated as characteristic of the entire word or of a considerable part of it.

In the phonological analysis of Tigre a prosodic feature of this kind may be abstracted, the relevant phonetic observation being that there are sequences of open front vowels, and that within those sequences there are no half open central vowels. It is this feature that is referred to in the title as ‘openness’.

While Abdülhamid is usually represented as an extreme example of a ‘censorship sultan’, this article seeks to redress the balance and to present a more nuanced picture of Abdülhamid's relationship with the press. Based largely on archival material from Istanbul, the article investigates how press magnates sought to use their relationship with the palace in order to ensure their survival and to gain the concessions they wanted, and how, in turn, the sultan manipulated the press and used it to cultivate his own image and to present the empire and his sultanate in the way he wished, both to his own subjects and to other states outside the Ottoman frontier.

To the extent there is an African academic approach, it is comparative (showing that the African world has similarities with the biblical). There are some “post-colonial” and similar readings, but this academic study is in the main done by Western-trained academics and directed at Western readers. There has been relatively little study of the way the Bible is actually used in churches, especially at the very grassroots. In mainline churches, the Bible is generally taken (as in the West) as a book of revelation which the preacher must expound and apply. In the new fast-growing Pentecostal sector the Bible is conceived quite differently, and understood as a record of covenants, promises, pledges and commitments between God and his chosen. It is not just a record of covenants and commitments to others in the past. It is not primarily a historical document at all. It is a contemporary document; it tells of God's covenant with and commitment to me, and to me now. These promises in scripture are effected in believers' lives through proclamation. The major biblical motifs in this emerging Christianity are thus those stressing victory, success, hope, achievement. The texts that are dominant are therefore prophetic texts, and narratives of those who can be made to illustrate success.

Among the many unpublished works of the Shehu ‘Uthmān dan Fodio three have come to my notice which are of interest in that they illustrate the development of a tradition of reform which, having remote origins in the Almoravid movement of the eleventh century A.D. achieved literary expression in the Muslim empire of Songhay, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which was continued in the Habe kingdoms almost three centuries later. They also illustrate the continuity of social custom in the Sudan over this period. The works are:

The remarkable group of five rock-cut temples at Māmallapuram or Māvalivaram, to the south of Madras, has often been described. Popular imagination has associated these wonderful shrines with the Pāṇḍvas; thus it has happened that the one which is smallest in size has become known as the rath of Draupadi. Evidently this temple was in reality dedicated to some form of the goddess Durga, whose effigy, standing on the severed head of the Buffalodemon, is found carved upon the outer wall, whereas her vehicle in the form of a well-conceived but unfinished lion-statue may be seen at no great distance.

The relations within the suffixed forms of the Turkish word havt hitherto been treated as a series of unconnected statements as a result of the phonological and grammatical levels of analysis being made in phonemic terms. ‘Vowel Harmony’, which implies a separating out of the vowels from the rest of the word structure, ‘Consonant Alternance’, and ‘variant’ forms with the implication of consonants ‘changing’ from one form to another, all these are statements not related to the structure of the word, and bring in their train some irregularities in the grammatical statement where none need arise.

THE historians1 who take the death of Jihan-shah's son Hasan 'All in 873/1468 as the end of the Qara-qoyunlu dynasty disregard the fact that for some time the descendants of Qara-Yusuf survived in Hamadan and in the beginning of the 16th century rose to new honours as the Qutb-shahs of Golconda. Under Indian skies they kept up their family traditions, and their court historians summed up afresh the history of the Qara-qoyunlu and restored the missing links in the genealogy of the kings of Golconda. These links form the special subject of the present article.

This paper outlines the centrality of the Late Roman period in the settlement history of Palestine, and the marginal contribution of the Christian establishment to the development of the land. Settlement momentum during these periods resulted from the fact that Palestine was part of the Roman Empire. The historical trends in Palestine should be regarded as part of a broader political settlement drive that characterized the eastern parts of the Roman realm during the period under discussion. The argument that the process of expansion was unique and stemmed from Palestine's holiness in the eyes of the Christian world is unfounded.

This study is mainly based on the writings of two authors: Ibn FaḍAllāh al-‘Umarī (d. 749/1349) and al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418). Al-‘Umarī has in the first part of his encyclopedia Maslik al-absār fī mamālik al-amṣār a section, the fifteenth,1 dealing with the Arab tribes of his time.