Muḥammad I, the founder of the Naṣrid Sultanate in 629/1232, originated the first dynasty, al–dawla al–ghālibiyya al-nasriyya, as it has been called in modern times from his laqab, al-ghālib bi-llāh (= “the victor through Allāh”). He was succeeded by his son Muḥammad II al-Faqīh and grandsons Muḥammad III al-Makhlū‘ (= “the Dethroned”) and Abū I-Juyūsh Naṣr, with whom the direct masculine line of the al-Aḥmares (= “the Reds”) ended. Naṣr was dethroned by his nephew Ismā‘īl I, the son of their paternal sister Fāṭima and her husband the ra‘īs of Málaga, Abū Sa‘īd Faraj, who was also a member of the royal family.

I shall deal here with the sultans of the second dynasty up to the death of Muḥammad V, and will concentrate on its three main figures: Ismā‘īl I, his second son YūsufI and grandson Muḥammad V, and deal only briefly with Muḥammad IV - the firstborn son of Ismā‘īl I – and Muḥammad VI el Bermejo (the Redhead), a relative and brother-in-law of Ismā‘īl II. However, we should first establish the identity and origins of Ismā‘īl I‘s father, to understand why he did not become the first sultan of the new dynasty.

At the beginning of the eighth century A.D. a new town was built in Palestine, called al- Ramla (Ramlah of today). It was founded by the then provincial governor, Sulaymān b. ‘Abd al-Malik (d. 717) in order to serve as the capital of Jund Filasṭīn, the southern province of Palestine. The building of a new town, and especially of a capital city, constituted a significant departure in the Palestine environment, for two main reasons. First, it was the first city to be founded after a period of 350 years, i.e., for most of the Byzantine epoch. Second, though the Muslims ruled the country for 1100 years, al-Ramla remained the sole example of a new town in the whole of Palestine.

This article provides an historical review of the Arabic rendering of Swahili, while Appendix A (Parts I and II) contains proposals for the development of Arabic script to yield a phonologically adequate writing system for a variety of Swahili spoken on the East African coast – the variety known as kiMvita (central Swahili), and spoken from just north of T’akaungu to Mombasa, and thence as far south as Gasi. Parallel possibilities for the refinement of romanised script are not considered in any detail.

It should be stressed that kiMvita, the variety of Swahili here described, is not the standardised language. For a number of reasons, the Swahili speech of Zanzibar town, together with the Swahili spoken by Africans from the interior of the continent but resident in Zanzibar, were the varieties of Swahili with which the pioneering standardises of Swahili were familiar.

In examining the development of colonial capitalism in India historians have increasingly recognized the importance of specific cultural contexts in determining the character of the emergent industrial sector. In particular, the impact of pre-capitalist mores on the recruitment, organization and supervision of industrial workers has been an important concern. In the Calcutta jute industry, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty has concluded that the authority of factory sardars was derived largely from a pre-capitalist culture with “a strong emphasis on religion, community, kinship, language, and other similar loyalties”. Similarly, Ranajit Das Gupta's exploration of the industrial labour market in north eastern India has revealed that “indebtedness, primordial loyalties and relations of personal dependency were extensively used to keep labour under control”. Studies of trade union development have also acknowledged the enduring importance of the cultural milieu carried by workers to the mills, mines and plantations of colonial India.

In the final chapter of his novel, The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn extols the virtues of the felt boot: “A pair of felt boots are the two best friends a prisoner will ever have … Woe then to anyone whose feet are not shod in felt boots! … But the prisoner wearing his own felt boots has not a care in the world.” Solzhenitsyn writes for those unfamiliar with the extremes faced by the society he is describing. Similarly, but far removed in time, we are accustomed to learning a great deal more about the uses of felt among nomadic peoples from travellers who have purportedly visited them than we do from such rare accounts as The Secret History of the Mongols (SH) which emanate from sources close to the nomads themselves.