MS Or. 2529 in the British Museum contains three Karaite Judaeo-Arabic fragments written in Hebrew script. The first two fragments (folios 1–95) are, according to the catalogue, ‘copies of Mahommedan philosophical works in defence of Mu'tazilite doctrines’. No author's name is given. It appears that the only reference to one of these two fragments, in an attempt to identify their author, was made by A. Ya. Borisov in his article on the Mu'tazilite MSS in the State Public Library, Leningrad. In that article Borisov described in detail 13 fragments which constitute part of the Firkovich collection. The contents of all 13 fragments are of a distinct Mu'tazilite character, but in only two of them (nos. 2 and 11 in Borisov's list) are the titles and the authors' names explicitly stated: al-Muḥīṭ, by 'Abd al-Jabbāar, and Dhakhīrat al-'ālim wa-baṣīrat al-muta'allim by al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā. Contrary to Borisov's expectations, his article has apparently not attracted the attention of scholars, except for some short bibliographical references.

The recently edited fragments of the Sīra of Wahb b. Munabbih are probably the earliest extant document of sīra-literature. R. G. Khoury painstakingly performed the laborious task of deciphering the extremely difficult text of the papyrus, and has prepared a careful edition of it. There remain, however, some misreadings which may lead to an erroneous understanding of the text. These are corrected in the present paper.

Mvet is used, in the A 70 languages, both for a type of musical instrument and for the special genres of oral literature played or delivered to its accompaniment.

As the name for a musical instrument mvet has been variously translated as ‘musical bow’, ‘cithar-harp’, ‘native guitar’, and so forth. It is, technically speaking, a chordophone with resonators. The commonest type consists basically of a dry ‘bamboo’ (Wes Kos name; in fact the stem of a palm frond, nnen zam, Raphia sp.) about four feet in length, an inch and a half in diameter, and slightly curved. The bark is slit, on the convex side, into four thin strips left attached at both ends, then raised on an indented wooden peg, set slightly off centre. These strings (minsam) are adjusted for tuning by bark or leather rings sliding along the stem. Calabashes are tied underneath as resonators, the biggest, central one being considered male, the others female.

It has been generally accepted by modern scholars that al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān was in the beginning either a Mālikī or a Ḥanafī and that he subsequently became an Imāmī and finally adopted the Ismā'īlī faith. The Imāmī savants, from al-Qāḍī Nūr Allāh Shūshtarī to Āghā Buzurg-i Tihrānī, maintain that al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān was one of their co-religionists. Ismā'īlīs, on the other hand, regard him as one of the pillars of their da'wa. In the light of recently discovered sources and of the consequent revaluation and reinterpretation of earlier works, a re-examination of the question of al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān's madhhab becomes necessary. The present article attempts to do precisely that, and show how and when the theory of al-Qāḍī al-Nu'mān's conversion originated.

While acknowledging the complexity of fourteenth-century Persian painting, it would be fair to state that one of the things that makes the painting of 1400 so visibly and obviously different from that of 1300 is the introduction in the course of that century of a number of technical developments which increased, quite dramatically, the area of picture-space available to the artist. Undoubtedly the most important of these was ‘the development of the “high horizon” technique, whereby the ground is seen, as it were, from above so that the figures can be spaced out in various planes without interfering with one another, thus allowing the composition to be conceived on a larger scale with the corresponding diminution in scale of the human figures in proportion to the whole’. To this one might add the expansion of the composition beyond the confines of the frame in a manner more ambitious than hitherto, and, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the appearance of the double-page miniature which is perhaps the logical conclusion of these developments.

A study of the dialects of Fula (the language of the Fulɓe or Fulani) can be of interest both to the linguist and to the sociolinguist: partly because of the sheer scale of the undertaking, with what is essentially the same language being spoken by Fulani from Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea on the Atlantic coast to Nigeria and Cameroon on the east; and partly because of the complexity of the movements that have taken place over the centuries, and of the resulting varied pattern of social, cultural, and economic relationships between different Fulani groups and between Fulani and other peoples. It could also be of interest, not simply as a dialect study as such, but also for the light it might throw on comparable phenomena in multilingual situations.

The Shāhsevan tribes of Persia are a heterogeneous collection of groups brought together in a confederation of that name some time between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The question of how and when this confederation was formed is something of a riddle, which arises from the following considerations.

Until the twentieth century the Bedouin of the Sinai peninsula and the Negev desert were no less dependent upon knowledge of the heavenly bodies than their nomadic ancestors of countless generations in the Arabian peninsula. The stars were as vital to a Bedouin trying to find his way in almost featureless stretches of the desert waste as they were to a sailor navigating the open sea. Moreover, the Bedouin needed stable indications of the seasons of the year so that they could regulate the annual activities necessary for agriculture and livestock raising; the only calendar they knew was the Muslim lunar calendar, the months of which rotate among the seasons of the year, at times appearing in the winter, at others in the spring, summer, or autumn. They found these indications in the positions of the stars. Finally, their preoccupation with the heavenly bodies and their nightly exposure to starry skies naturally led the inhabitants of the desert, like many other peoples, to find, in the movements of the stars, explanations for the natural disasters to which they were always so vulnerable.

In 1883 Hervey de Saint-Denys translated a passage from Ma Tuan-lin's Wên-hsien t'ung-k'ao, which mentions missions to China from Sêng-kaoWu-ling, Chia-chaand Chiu-mi. Ma Tuan-lin states that these countries were conquered by Chên-la (Cambodia) after the yung-hui reign period (650–6).

The following text is taken from a MS owned by the monastery of May Anbäsa Kidanä Mәhrät, about 15 km. west of Makalle, on the new road to Hagärä, Sälam. The MS is described by its owners as Mäshafä Wägris, and contains the following items.

In a number of Nilotic languages spoken in East Africa it has been shown that there exists formal marking of case based exclusively on tonal differentiation. This has been fully described in Maasai (Tucker and Mpaayei, 1955) and all investigated Kalenjin dialects (Tucker and Bryan, 1962. 1964–5). It also is clearly present in my own data on Teso, though interestingly enough it seems to be lacking in the Luo group generally.

This article is a sequel to some previously published work, during the preparation of which I was fortunate enough to have the benefit of many discussions with Wilfred Whiteley. While one cannot assume that the results as presented here would meet with his approval, it is certain that the subject stirred his interest; I hope therefore it will not be considered too unlikely a candidate for the honour of inclusion in his memorial volume

The most northerly section of the African Rift Valley is inhabited by a pastoral people who call themselves 'Afar. Their present territory extends eastward from the scarp of the Ethiopian plateau and as far north and east as the Red Sea. The railway line between Addis Ababa and Jibuti appears to coincide with the southernmost fringes of 'Afar population. The area is mainly desert or semi-desert, and contains numerous tokens of its geological past in the form of volcanoes, lava fields, and hot springs. Survival is not easy in this harsh environment, so that to some extent most 'Afars are obliged to live a seasonally nomadic existence. Certain areas do have permanent habitations, but 'Afars have never taken seriously to agriculture and those who live in villages along the coast and engage in fishing probably exemplify the most radical departure from pastoralism. Most of the terrain described lies within Ethiopia, but there are a great many 'Afars in the contiguous Territoire Français des Afars et des Issas. As far as the 'Afar are concerned this political boundary does not underscore any tribal divisions of note and there is a good deal of contact between folk occupying areas on different sides of the border.

One of the commonplaces with regard to Ethiopian literature is the fact that it is heavily indebted to foreign sources for much of its material. The initial works of Ethiopic literature were made from Greek but as knowledge of that language faded, undoubtedly owing to the spread of Muslim hegemony which isolated Ethiopia from contact with Christianity outside Africa, translation from Greek came to an end. With the ‘restoration’ of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270, increased literary activity brought about the translation into Ge‘ez (Ethiopic) of a number of Arabic works, usually those of Christian writers.

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.

It seldom occurs that a philologist has the opportunity of seeing the results of his labours confirmed or disproved by the discovery of new material. In the field of Oriental studies such events occur relatively less seldom but bear equal testimony to the value of philological studies. What would in many instances have remained conjectures concerning the text of the Siddhasāra, conjectures having various degrees of probability according to the arguments advanced and the material available, have now been proved correct by the discovery of three previously unknown MSS of the Siddhasāra composed by Kavigupta. It could, of course, be claimed that this discovery has rendered superfluous the philological studies hitherto made, but it is in fact precisely these studies which enable us to appreciate the value of the readings provided by the newly dis-covered MSS. Moreover, the confirmation provided by the new discovery shows that the state of knowledge achieved by philological research was in fact a definite advance in our knowledge of the text.

These two terms, which occur in the late thirteenth-century Anonymus IV treatise (De mensuris et discantu), have often been cited as evidence of Arab musical influence in Western Europe: either in connexion with developments in melodic style, since they are identified as currentes, or, perhaps more ambitiously, in support of the contention that the emergence of mensural music in Western Europe was prompted by contact with Arab musical practice, which had long possessed a complex system of rhythmic modes

The study of oral literature is among the many areas to which Wilfred Whiteley made an important contribution. He was one of the founder editors of the extensive ‘Oxford Library of African Literature’, and played an essential part in both the development of the study of African oral literature and the maintenance of scholarly standards through generous encouragement and informed advice to colleagues and students working in this area. His primary interest was in Africa but, with his background in Classical studies and his continuing co-operatioii with American folklorists, he also took a wide comparative approach to oral literature. It is appropriate therefore to devote this paper, in a volume in his memory, to some comments on one aspect of oral literature viewed in a comparative context.