The Imāmī Shī'ī theory of the imāmate evolved gradually during the first Islamic century and was given a definitive shape in the middle of the second/eighth century by Hishām b. al-Ḥakam. For the next 100 years or so, until the death in 260/874 of the eleventh Imām, al-Ḥasan al-'Askarī, no significant changes seem to have been introduced. Only in the mid-fourth/tenth century does a major addition appear in the form of a doctrine: it is the belief that there are 12 Imāms, the last of whom remains in a state of concealment (ghayba) until his ultimate return as Mahdī, or Qā'im. This ghayba is divided into two periods: a shorter, ‘lesser’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-ṣughrā), lasting from 260/874 to 329/941, during which the Imām was represented on earth by four successive safīrs; and a longer, ‘greater’ ghayba (al-ghayba al-kubrā), whose duration is known only to God. It is this doctrine which distinguishes Twelver Shī'ism from the earlier Imāmiyya, and it io worth examining in some detail ite origina and the-main-stages of its development.

European contemporaries regarded Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes's general, as one of the most prominent leaders of Ethiopia in the crucial period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was a period in which the country was struggling to remain independent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The Ras was referred to as ‘the best native general and strategist that Africa has perhaps produced in modern times’, and ‘undoubtedly’ the ‘greatest leader that Abyssinia has produced since the death of the Emperor Theodore in 1868’. His Italian adversaries thought in 1885 that ‘Ras Alula is the most serious, the most influential, and the strongest personality in today's Abyssinia. The word of Alula is heard with enthusiasm and confidence by the King’. A Sudanese Mahdist historian wrote that ‘Ras Allulā was one of the famous and brave men in war, very experienced in the tactics of battles. He was a bone in the throat of the British, Italian, and Turkish [Egyptian] empires’. A British soldier and diplomat was of the opinion that ‘the Abyssinian generalissimo’ was ‘apparently the moving spirit of that country’.

The aim of the editor, Walid ‘Arafat, 'to produce as complete a record as possible of the poetry ascribed to Hassān b. Thabit in the different recensions of the Dīwān and in other sources together with the scholia in the Dīwān, additional notes from other sources and editorial comments’, as stated in his preface (p. 1), has been pursued by him with praiseworthy perseverance, zeal, and dedication. Ten different manuscripts of the Dīwān have been closely examined and evaluated (introduction, pp. 10–23). The poems of the Dīwān have been accordingly divided in the following manner: poems 1–225 from the MS Ahmet III, 2534 (T) form the main part of the Dīwān; poems 226–63 from MS Ahmet III, 2584 (TA) form the second part of the Dīwān called al-Ziyādāt; the poems 264–372 are additions gathered from other sources (ziyādāt min ghayri makhtūtāt al-Dīwān). The ‘Introduction’ contains sections dealing with the life of Hassān (pp. 3–7), former editions of the Dīwān (pp. 7–10), recensions of the Dīwān and its MSS (pp. 10–23), and the authenticity of the poems (pp. 23–31). In his sharp criticism of the authenticity of a great many of the poems ascribed to Hassān, ‘Arafat often refers to his own articles, basing his conclusions on an analysis of the style and composition of these poems, the historical circumstances and developments, and the statements of early Muslim scholars.

After this he (Yohannes) gave him a crown of precious jewels and clothes of gold and horses adorned with gold and silver. His appearance was changed before all the nobles, and his face shone seven times brighter than the sun in the month of Nisan, and his clothes were white like ice. And he 6a (the king) said to him, ‘Rejoice and / be glad, my son, who have been faithful over one; I appoint you over many. Enter into the joy of your lord. As you have made me rejoice, so I will make you rejoice every day and every hour, and I will give you favour and honour before all the nobles. I will do for you all that you wish, and all that you think’. He commanded the troops and said to them, ‘All that he commands you, do; and that which he says to you, observe’.

Any attempt to write about the Ibāḍī imāma is faced with the same kind of problem which besets all efforts to provide a generalized account of an Islamic institution: how far to concentrate on the abstract theory and how far to describe the actual practices observed in different places at various times. In this paper the writer has tried to strike a balance between these two approaches by taking as his theme an aspect of the Ibāḍi imāmate that involves basic principles about the nature of the contract which the Ibadi community enters into when it elects an Imām, and to study it specifically from the Omani point of view, through the writings of the local ‘ulamā’ and the way elections have been conducted in that country from the second/eighth down to the fourteenth/twentieth centuries. No attempts will be made to compare this material with the parallel sources from the Maghrib, nor to contrast the Ibāḍī concepts of the imāma with those of other Islamic systems.

Books dealing with the recent history of Ethiopia such as Greenfield's Ethiopia, a new political history, or Del Boca's The Ethiopian war, 1935–1941, state that a few works in Amharic have been written about this period. Though the number is not considerable, many books have been written on this subject, most of them by survivors of this conflict. Since they represent primary sources for the Ethiopian point of view, they are of great value, but there are several factors which complicate their utilization.

The generalization that it was during the Mamlūk period that the Copts were reduced to a small minority in Egypt is a familiar one which has been frequently repeated since Gaston Wiet broached it some 50 years ago. Using this generalization as a point of departure, I intend to review the evidence in the Arabic sources which touches upon the actual process of conversion which occurred during the period 692–755/1293–1354, attempting to discover, if possible, the extent of conversion during those years and the causes which lay behind it. The dates that I have chosen are not altogether arbitrary since they correspond, as we shall see, to certain demarcations in the history of conversion noted by Mamlūk historians themselves; furthermore, I have deliberately excluded the period of the Crusades from consideration in the belief that this period should be studied separately in order to determine whether the Mamlūks' involvement in the Crusades affected their policy toward the indigenous Christians of Egypt to any appreciable extent. Although my findings in this article tend to support Wiet's generalization, I hope to offer richer, more detailed documentation for it than has been offered heretofore and, in so doing, to contribute to our understanding of Mamlūk social history.

Yenitsa, in Ottoman Turkish Yenije-i Vardar or Vardar Yenijesi, is a small town some 50 km. west of Thessaloniki. Situated at the foot of Mount Païkon, near the lake of the same name (which was drained several years ago), it was in the Ottoman period an important Turkish military and cultural centre, particularly as being the base of the ghāzīs, the ‘warriors for the Faith’, who had followed the great march-lord (uj-begi) Evrenos on his campaigns in Thrace and Macedonia. Very early, perhaps as early as 1372, Evrenos had come to Central Macedonia with his followers and settled in this place, where already there was probably a Byzantine castle. There soon grew up a township, from which Evrenos and his sons and grandsons set out on repeated raids in all directions, devastating the countryside and preparing the way for the definitive occupation of Macedonia, and later of Albania, by the ‘central’ apparatus under the command of the sultan. It is probable that the several occupations of various towns in this area, such as Veria (Turkish: Karaferye) and Thessaloniki, were the achievement of these raiders. Yenije soon had a con-siderable Turkish population, so that in 1430, after the final occupation of Thessaloniki, Murad II was able to order the deportation from there to the newly-conquered city of a thousand Turkish families without reducing Yenije's prosperity.

The following is an attempt to relate the distribution of linguistic variants in the spoken Arabic of southern Iraq and Khūzistān to certain geographical areas on the one hand and to certain demographically isolatable groups on the other. These factors correlate in certain cases with political regions of earlier times. The geographical areas are relatable to communication patterns of preautomobile times and to some extent group around the main waterways of the area, the Tigris, Euphrates, Shaṭṭ al-'Arab, and Kārūn. The demographic groupings involved in particular what may be referred to as degree of sedentari-zation and also degree of contact with the nomad populations in the desert to the west of the Euphrates. It is true that in some cases the social and regional groupings were coextensive; however, the distinction between the two is maintained in the treatment because the linguistic features correlating with demographic groups could be shown to have similar demographic relevance in other areas of Mesopotamia, while the features regarded as primarily of regional relevance were relevant only to the area under investigation.

The publication by Professor Gérard Fussman of the trilingual Kuṣāṇa inscription at Dasht-i Nāvur in Afghanistan is a major event both for historical and linguistic studies. Appropriately termed by Paul Bernard ‘the Rosetta Stone of Afghanistan’, the find is impressive for its novelties, especially (in addition to Bactrian and Kharoṣṭhī) a well-preserved version in wholly unknown script and language. Yet unlike its namesake, it does not immediately solve all problems.

Linguists who are interested in Arabic are familiar with the fact that in spoken Arabic certain syllables stand out to the ear more than others; these syllables have been variously referred to as stressed or prominent syllables. The phenomenon of prominence has been treated by a number of linguists who have regarded it mainly as a characteristic of the word. But it has to be viewed as a characteristic of the one-word piece or pieces of a more complex structure with more than one prominent syllable.

It is now some years since Professor Halil İnalcik expressed the hope that a ‘systematic investigation in the library collections of Turkey’ might bring to light, in their original independent form, the fifteenth-century Ottoman ‘calendars’ (taḳvīm) or ‘chronological lists’ whose existence is to be postulated from the analysis of the style and content of the chronicle-texts into which they have evidently been incorporated. The subject of these lists was then much in my mind, so that while I was in Turkey in 1958–91 was on the look-out for such a text. My search, if not ‘systematic’, was fairly thorough; all the same, it was fruitless: I came upon several late examples, to indicate that the chronological list remained a favourite form of compilation beyond the fifteenth century, but no early self-contained text, relating the events of two or three decades, of the type whose existence the chronicles indicated. The kindness of a colleague, however, has now led me in London to what I believe to be the copy of such a text.

The history of the Zaydiyya and the growth of Zaydī thought, law, and doctrine have become increasingly well known as a result of studies by R. Strothmann, E. Griffini, C. van Arendonk, W. Madelung, and others. As Madelung has convincingly shown in his book on al-Qāsim b. Ibrāhīm, Zaydī doctrine, which initially differed appreciably from that of the Mu'tazila on many issues, eventually adopted all of the principal tenets of Mu'tazilism. At the same time, the various Zaydī branches retained the essential Shī'ī belief in an Imām descended from ‘Alī and Fāṭima. Yet the Zaydī doctrine of the imāmate differs from the doctrine of Imāmī (or Twelver) Shī'ism in some important respects: the Zaydī Imām is not infallible, sinless, and omniscient, and, according to the Batrī Zaydīs, he need not even always be the most excellent person of his generation. Most Zaydīs maintained instead that the Imām had to prove his leadership by fighting for the faith (jihād). The Imāmī claim that all the Imāms had been personally designated by God and His Prophet was restricted by the Zaydīs to ‘Alī, al-Ḥasan, and al-Ḥusayn.

The word gotra is frequently used in the literature of Mahāyāna Buddhism to denote categories of persons classified according to their psychological, intellectual, and spiritual types. The chief types usually mentioned in this kind of classification are the Auditors making up the śrāvaka-gotra, the Individual Buddhas making up the pratyehabuddha-gotra, and the Bodhisattvas making up the bodhisattva-gotra. In the Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra these three types constitute altogether different gotras, which thus coincide with the three separate Vehicles (yāna) as recognized by the Yogācārin/Vijñaptimātratā, school. To these three some sources add the further category of the undetermined (aniyatagotra), which is made up of persons not yet definitively attached to one of the three preceding classes; and the non-gotra (agotra), that is the category made up of persons who cannot be assigned to any spiritual class. Each of the first three categories is thus comprised of persons capable of achieving a particular kind of maturity and spiritual perfection in accordance with their specific type or class, the Auditor then attaining the Awakening (bodhi) characteristic of the Śrāvaka and so on. Especially remarkable in this connexion, and somewhat anomalous as a gotra, is the non-gotra, i.e. that category of persons who seem to have been considered, at least by certain Yogācārin authorities, as spiritual ‘outcastes’ lacking the capacity for attaining spiritual perfection or Awakening of any kind; since they therefore achieve neither bodhi nor nirvāṇa, they represent the same type as the icchantikas to the extent that the latter also are considered to lack this capacity.

The Mahānubhāvas are a Hindu sect whose members are largely concentrated in northern and eastern Maharashtra, between the old districts of Khandesh and Nagpur, while they are strongest of all in Berar. In many respects they have a rather marginal place in the culture of Maharashtra today. Unlike the Vārkarī pantha, the much more celebrated and popular Vaiṣṇava sect, they are centred on a backwoods area. They tend to gather in maṭhas (monasteries) in decayed villages that are a day's journey from the nearest railway or main road. Instead of Alandi, which is on Poona's doorstep, or Pandharpur, their holy places are Ritpur, a crumbling dusty village in the rolling country north of Amraoti, and Mahur, on a mountainside on the borders of Berar and the Adilabad district of Andhra. Like the Vārkarīs their followers are almost all non-Brahmans, but unlike the Vārkarīs they have, until recently at least, acquired few Brahman champions to lend them ethical and religious respectability, and indeed they are chiefly known in Marathi folk-lore as typifying a virulent brand of hypocrisy—the stereotype of a sweet tongue and professions of virtue that cover up all sorts of unseemly and unspecified ‘goings-on’. Their numbers are relatively small. Enthoven, whose section on them in The tribes and castes of Bombay is one of the few references to the sect in English, gives it an estimated membership of about 22,000 in 1901, and it is hard to judge what relation this figure would bear to the number of professed Mahānubhāvas today. The modern census figures are of course no help, since Mahānubhāvas are included under the general heading of Hindus.

The purpose of this paper is to present to scholars of Tibetan and Himalayan culture a document which is recited annually to an assembled militia organization during the New Year festival observed in the old winter capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan at Punakha. Apart from attempting to disclose the origin of this custom, which can be traced with some accuracy to the middle years of the seventeenth century, it is intended to relate it briefly to the wider context of the New Year celebrations as they used to be held in Tibet and as they continue to be held with considerable variance in Bhutan and other places on the periphery of Tibetan culture. In certain areas an ancient and fundamental distinction between the ‘King's New Year’ (rgyal-po lo-gsar) and the ‘Agricultural New Year’ (so-nam lo-gsar) has survived and my remarks on the relevant Bhutanese traditions are made on the basis of these two categories.

During the first season of excavations in 1971 at the Islamic site of Ghubayrā, in Kirmān province, a complete and richly decorated bronze bowl came to light. It was found on the Citadel Central Mound in a room designated room 1A. Because of the finds recovered from here such as Saljūq white pottery, a small lustre-painted bowl, a minā'ī sherd, and some glass vessels—this room was commonly called by the excavators the ‘Seljūq room’. The excavation of this room, together with its ground-plan and elevation, has already been reported, and the bronze bowl has also been illustrated. As only a few complete Islamic metal objects have been discovered in scholarly excavations, this piece from Ghubayrā deserves a separate study.

In the sketchy accounts which at present stand in for histories of the modern Chinese theatre, the name of Li Chien-wu appears either not at all, or in the lists of ‘these also served’. He was one of the several talented play-wrights who neither presented themselves early enough to earn honourable mention as pioneers, nor were emphatic enough to make a lasting political impression. He came of age in that lost, perhaps now futile, decade of the 1930's when so many Chinese writers discovered what to do with the art forms their predecessors had introduced and experimented with, when the native genius had absorbed and was beginning effectively to explore the wider possibilities of literature—the darker recesses of the mind, the lighter uplands of comedy—which Western works had opened to them.

This paper attempts to deal with a short passage found at the end of the third chapter of the Huai Nan tzu book, a compendium of learning assembled in about 120 B.c. under the patronage of the prince Liu An I first became interested in it after reading the tantalizing reference in Needham (SCC, III, 224). (It occurs to me that the preceding sentence or some variant of it is likely to occur in learned journals with a high frequency for the next 50 years at least.) My first efforts to understand the original text led me to the conclusion that it was unique in a number of ways and had points of interest that did not fully appear in the version of Maspero, 1929, 348 ff. Professors A. C. Graham and D. C. Lau both gave very generously of their time in discussions of my first draft. Professor Graham raised the question of possible Mohist influences and brought to my notice a commentary by the Ch'ing scholar Ch'ien T'ang , Huai Nan tzu t'ien wen hsün pu chu c. 1788. I did not feel able to follow Ch'ien in all he wrote, but was relieved to find that we reached the same general conclusions about what the text was saying, although Ch'ien seems to miss much that is important. While there are still some obscurities of language in what appears to be a rather corrupt text, I offer the version given here with a fair degree of conviction that it does not substantially misrepresent the intentions of the unknown author. Any errors that I have obstinately retained despite the helpful advice given to me throughout the time I was engaged on this work are, of course, my responsibility alone.