This essay analyses the sole extant chapter of a fourth/tenth-century Faḍā'il al-Ṣaḥaba work by the ḥadı̄th critic and scholar Al-Ḥasan ʿAlı̄ ibn ʿUmar ibn Aḥmad Ibn Mahdı̄ ibn Masʿūd al-Dāraquṭnı̄ (d. 385/995). As scholars have noted, faḍā’il literature beyond the chapters on religious merits of the Companions in the Ṣaḥı̄ḥayn is among a number of sub-genres of tradition-based literature (alongside, for example, targhı̄b wa tarhı̄b), which tends largely to be comprised of weak, non-canonical ḥadı̄th. This has generally been interpreted as evidence of the acceptability of “lower standards” for the inclusion of ḥadı̄th in exhortatory or edifying literature (lower when compared to standards for the authentication of ḥadı̄th in relation to law). This conceptualization both centres law as the dominant lens through which to view the reception of ḥadı̄th in general, and contributes to the marginalization of faḍā’il literature as merely folkloric. Using a history of emotions perspective to elucidate the nature and mechanisms of edification and pious instruction in faḍā’il texts, this essay argues that far from being marginal, faḍā’il works were central to the formation of emotional communities and to the construction of pious subjects in the Būyid period. Al-Dāraquṭnı̄'s fragmentary text reflects how a well-known and highly respected fourth-century ḥadı̄th scholar capitalized on the emotional resonances and sectarian ambiguities made available by the abundance of non-legal and non-prophetic ḥadı̄th generated during the second and third centuries ah.

In the death of Professor Ida Ward in the Guildford Hospital on 10th October 1949, just after her sixty-ninth birthday, African studies lost one of their greatest exponents, and Africa one of its best friends.

Ida Caroline Ward was born in Bradford on the 4th October 1880, the eighth child of a Yorkshire wool merchant. Prom a school in Bradford she went to the Darlington Training College and later to Durham University, where she graduated B.Litt. with distinction. The North Country background of her early years remained with her always and gave a delightful “ common-sense ” colour to her character.

After sixteen years of teaching in secondary schools, she joined the Phonetics Department under Professor Daniel Jones in University College, London, in 1919, and soon established herself as an authority in the phonetics of the main European languages and in the study of speech defects. Noteworthy works of this period are A Handbook of English Intonation (written in collaboration with the late Lilian E. Armstrong), The Phonetics of English, and Speech Defects, Their Nature and Cure. Her interest in her mother tongue persisted, and she was actually working on another edition of the book on English Intonation when she died.

It was while lecturing at University College to missionaries that her interests turned towards West African languages—Kanuri, Igbo and Efik were her first fields of African research—and her first major work, The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Efik (for which the University of London awarded her the D.Lit. in 1933), threw a new light on the study of these languages, and showed that intonation, that element hitherto so elusive, was one that could and should be studied if justice was to be done to African languages.

Only one Islamic metal vessel can be said with certainty to have been made at Mosul. This is the so-called Blacas Ewer in the British Museum which bears an Arabic inscription stating that it was engraved by ujā’ b. Man'a al-Mawṣilī at Mosul in the month of Rajab 629 (= May 1232).

This article examines several fatwās by the important Muslim reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā. It treats these fatwās as part of a broader Arabic debate on “materialism” at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In this context, Riḍā's fatwās on materialism illustrate the changing nature of Islamic religious authority in this period, as new kinds of knowledge became available to new kinds of readers.

This article offers a comparative examination of the literary responses of four leading early modern Pashtun authors to an armed clash in the Momand tribe in 1711. The responses include a chronicle record in prose (Afżal Khān Khaṫak) and three poems – an elegy (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Momand), a satire (ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Momand), and a war ode (ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṫak). Discussed as both authentic historical documents and creative writings linked to a local social discourse, these Pashto texts enable us to reassess the intensity of everyday literary communications in Pashtun tribal areas in early modern times and append new factual material to the study of ethno-cultural processes within the Persophone oecumene. The salient stylistic and rhetoric diversity of the texts not only highlights the authors’ individual mindsets and literary techniques, but also provides an insight into a variety of social moods, political attitudes and ethics in the Pashtun traditional society.

One of the most bewildering problems in Muslim law concerns the classification and effect of various types of invalid marriage contract. As in a large number of other such problems, moreover, the conflicting views of the leading jurists and their followers, ancient and modern, are by no means confined to disputes between the recognized Sunni schools (the Hanafis, Malikis, Shafi‘is and Hanbalis), for within the Hanafi school itself the position is no less confu-sing. Some Hanafi jurists, for instance, make a clear distinction between marriage contracts which are irregular (fāsid) and those which are void (bātil), while others use the two words interchangeably. Again, those who make the distinction differ considerably as to which types of invalid marriage contract fall within each category, as to the juristic concepts on which their decision is based, and as to the legal effects involved. The present article represents an attempt to outline the development of Hanafi thought on this matter and thereby to clear up certain common misconceptions.

Abu Hanifa himself was relentlessly logical in his approach to this subject, although his logic led him to somewhat strange conclusions. Arguing from the premise that the constituent parts of most contracts are four in number, namely two “considerations” and two contracting parties, he held that if a divine prohibition made either consideration unlawful in nature or either party incompetent to act, then one of the constituent parts of the contract was lacking and the whole vitiated in its very essence: it was therefore void (bāṬil) and of no legal effect, just as though no agreement had been reached between the parties.

This paper introduces the exchange of letters in early Sufism, analyses the significance of these exchanges, and examines these documents not for their general literary qualities or for theoretical discussion of appropriate conduct but, rather, for actual data relating to personal and interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the crucial need for creating a corpus of Sufi letters and pieces of correspondence. The discussion is divided into methodological and conceptual-historical perspectives. The methodological perspective includes a survey of sources, the question of transmission, letter fragment usage by later authors, and a reconstruction attempt of the actual circumstances of these documents. The conceptual-historical perspective analyses content, rhetoric, argumentation forms, and self-representation.

This paper provides a new explanation for the insertion of *a in plural forms of *CVCC- nouns also formed with an external plural suffix, e.g. *ʕabd- : *ʕabad-ū- ‘servant(s)’, in various Semitic languages. This *CVCaC-ū- pattern is usually considered to be a remnant of the Proto-Semitic broken plural system in Northwest Semitic, but we show that it goes back to Proto-Semitic in this form. Internal evidence from Semitic as well as comparative evidence from Afroasiatic points towards a pre-Proto-Semitic plural suffix *-w- underlying the external plural suffixes. This suffix created a consonant cluster in the plural of *CVCC- nouns, triggering epenthesis of *a. As the prime example of broken plural formation in Northwest Semitic thus seems to be purely suffixal in origin, we conclude by briefly considering the implications for the history of nominal pluralization in Semitic.

Tocharian B eñcuwo “iron” and Tocharian A añcu* have been connected to the Iranian words for “iron”, notably Khwarezmian hnčw. On the basis of insights into the patterns of borrowings from Khotanese into Tocharian, it is argued that the Tocharian words must have been borrowed from a preform of Khotanese hīśśana- “iron”. Further, a new etymology is proposed for “iron” that accounts for the variation of this word in Iranian. The fact that Tocharian borrowed the word for “iron” from Khotanese, not from the archaic steppe dialect of Iranian that is the source of many other loanwords in Tocharian, suggests that the contacts between this latter dialect and Tocharian took place before iron became widespread in the region.

The use of the “archaic” perfect tense with suffix -ile in old Swahili has been mentioned by many writers, particularly Taylor and stigand. This form of the perfect is well known in other languages, but in modern Swahili the form with prefix-me-has taken its place.

It has hitherto been assumed that the Tone system of the Yoruba language comprised four tones, viz.—a high tone, a middle tone, a low tone, and a so-called compound tone. An examination of the phonetic structure of the language has led to the conclusion that there are other significant tónes which must be understood. The purpose of this article is to explain the Tone system of the language as viewed in the light of recent investigations. The observations and transcriptions are based upon the pronunciation of Mr. A. Baptist, a native Yoruba, to whom I am considerably indebted for his patience and his zealous interest in the subject.

Maewo is the northernmost island eastwards of the double chain of islands in Melanesia known as the New Hebrides. Dr. R. H. Codrington gives a grammar of Maewo in ML., pp. 408–420. The dialect used by him for the grammar was that of Tanoriki, a place some twelve miles from the north end of the island on the west side. This grammar was founded principally on information supplied by native scholars from that part of Maewo in the Melanesian Mission school at Norfolk Island. Codrington also made use of a small edition, 33 pp., of the Book of Common Prayer in the language. The translation of Psalm 100 in ML., p. 419, is taken from that book.