Waqf documents in Cairo form an invaluable yet relatively unexploited source of Egyptian history for the last six centuries. In a body of records of immense value for the quality of their content as well as their number is to be found data of great significance for virtually the entire spectrum of the extended social sciences. By waqf records is meant not simply the original waqfîya, or ḥhujja establishing the waqf, but those subsidiary documents that modify the original donation in some way. Each class of these documents provides information of a unique character. Together they afford one of the most intimate glimpses into the inner functioning of Egyptian urban and rural society.

The period of the so-called Patriarchal Caliphs continues to be rich with questions which can be investigated only with material which often seems less than adequate. Among the more intriguing questions are those connected with the rôle of Kûfa and the emergence there of the political alignments with which representatives both of the early Umayyad caliphs and of the anti-caliph Ibn al-Zubary had later to deal, viz. the Khawârij, the Shi'a and the tribal ashrâf. The remarks in this article are intended to present a broad picture of conclusions reached in a more detailed study of the formation of these political alignments – conclusions which are based on evidence contained in the earliest Islamic historical sources available to us, notably those of al-Balâdhurî, al-Tabarî, Ibn Sa'd, Ibn A'tham al-Kûfî, Khalîfa b. Khayyât and Nasr b. Muzâhim al-Minqarî.

One achievement of the philosophy represented by Ghazâlî is disentangling the creation argument for the existence of God from rival forms of design argument which allow or assume the eternity of the world. From its earliest expressions as an isolated insight which might easily be explained away as myth, the notion that the universe had been brought to be out of what is not was gradually tranformed under pressure of severe Aristottelian criticism into a precise concept, and the argument implicit in such a notion metamorphosed into an elegant and sophisticated demonstration. Backed up by the closely reasoned philosophy of being into which it was now integrated, the argument from creation might confidently hope to be proof against attack.

Spain in the sixteenth century was far from presenting the racial and spiritual homogeneity that the Spanish monarchs from Ferdinand and Isabella had sought to attain. That uniformity was the common aspiration of Spanish society during this period cannot be denied, but this was an ideal that bore little relation to reality. Regardless of the efforts put forth by the forces of racial and religious purity, there existed in Spain throughout the sixteenth century both social dissidents and unassimilated classes whose survival was considered an affront to the Spanish government, church and people. The largest of these non-conformist groups was the Moriscos (converted Moslems), who were scattered about the country in their own communities, each with its distinctive features and problems. In Valencia and Aragon, for example, the Moriscos were a rural people gaining their subsistence from the land; in Castile, on the other hand, they were concentrated in the towns, where they lived a ghetto-like existence on the fringes of society. Large numbers of these urban Moriscos lived in Andalusia and especially in Seville, a town that became as a result of its monopoly of the Indies trade, the most famous and important city in Spain at that time. The size and cosmopolitan atmosphere of this ‘new Babylonia’, as it was called by the literary figures of the period, naturally attracted all kinds of dissident elements; it was, in the words of Cervantes, ‘the asylum of the poor and the refuge of the outcast’.