‘Surra-man-raā’, says Mas'ūdī, ‘is the last the great cities founded in Islam.’ Seven in all, till the time of Mas'ūdī, these were according to him: Baṣra, founded in 17/638–9; kūfa, founded in 17/638–9; Fusṭāṭ, founded in 20/640–1; Ramla and Wāsiṭ, founded in 13–14/634–6; Baghdād, founded in 145/762–3; and surra-man-ra'ā, founded in 221/834–5. The one common feature was that, except for Ramla, these towns were all garrison centres. Built on the edge of the desert, the natural refuge for the predominantly nomadic Arab invading armies. the first five cities maintained all along an Arab-Islamic tradition. Emerging almost at the same time (save for Ramla) and marking at the respective moments of their emergence, historical landmarks in the rapid expansion of the Islamic empire in its first stages of growth, these five cities were populated on the whole by Muslim Arabs, who were to safeguard the conquests and gradually absorb rather than be absorbed by other elements. These cities were thus able to maintain that Arab-Islamic tradition which, challenged later by the heterogeneous cultural heritage of what became the Islamic World, proved strong enough to make and keep that world Islamic, though not wholly Arbic. This result was the fulfilment of the policies of the Caliph 'Umar I, under whose reign the major Islamic conquests were made and who, for direct strategic reasons, advised his generals to encamp their troops on the borders of the desert Arab lands and of the newly acquired territories.

The Galleria Estense in Mondena possesses an Islamic metal bowl which enriches our knowledge of Islamic metal work in more than one respect. This is a rounded, pot-shaped vessel (plate I), 11 cm. high and 27 cm. wide at its greatest diameter. The projecting part of the body is decorated with eight polylobed medallions intersected by oblong compartments enclosing a nakhī inscription and set against a densely filled background of flowering scrolls. The ‘neck’ of the bowl shows a narrow frieze of 24 running animals, which are placed in eight elongated panels containing three animals each. Whereas generally this frieze closely follows the traditional way of showing quadrupeds in pursuit (plate II (a, b)), there is a remarkable deviation from this arrangement in one of these compartments. It contains a camel, a lion, and a bull; these last two are shown in confrontation and seem to leap at each other as if in mutual attack (plate II (c)).

The beginning of the twentieth century marked a new and revolutionary stage in the history of Arabic poetry. Through the increasing influence of Western literature, some new genres which show only preliminary signs of emergence in the nineteenth century found official recognition, as in the case of the strophic verse, or experimenting with them was resumed, as in the case of the blank verse (shi'r mursal), which was first practisd by Rizq Allāh Ḥassūn in 1869 and which was revived in 1905, probably unconsciously, by Jamīl Ṣidqī al-Zahāwī (1863–1936), under the name of shi'r mursal.

The immense conservatism of Zoroastrisniam brings it about that, even where circumstances have forced a break in the continuity of particular observances, yet the maintenance of the main tradition of belief and practice is so strong that it leads in time to something very like these old observances coming back into being agin, in response to the continuing religious needs of the community. Thus the practices of latter-day Zoroastrianism are often of the greatest help for understanding diffcult points in the Pahlavi books. It is accordingly of interest to examine in their light those passages relating to the founding of sacred Fires which have been recently brought together by J.-P. de Menasce in his work Feux et fondations pieuse dans le droit sassanide; for, as the author points out, such juridical texts, embodying case-law, represent actual situations and practices, which can profitably be compared with those of to-day.

The Anglo-Russian Convention, signed at St. Petersburg on 31 August 1907, contained provisions relating to Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The text of the agreement would seem to suggest that the matters adjusted were purely local in character—an arrangement arrived at between two countries settling problems in far-away frontier regions. But the Anglo-Russian Convention was of much greater significance. It represented a change not only in Anglo-Russian relations, but in Britain's fundamental European policy. It also meant that the role of the Government of India, which had often been a powerful factor in the determination of foreign policy in the nineteenth century, became less significant. It seems highly probable, too, that in the years when Sir Edward Grey was Foreign Secretary (December 1905 to December 1916—holding office for a longer consecutive period than any other Foreign Secretary in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, the next being Castlereagh, 1812–22) the permanent staff of the Foreign Office exercised more influence and had a more decisive voice in the conduct of the country's foreign policy than they ever had before of have had since.

Baptist missionaries were the first to operate effectively in northern India. William Carey arrived in 1793, and worked for six years mainly in North Bengal, moving in 1800 to the Danish settlement of Serampore to join Joshua Marshman and William Ward. From the beginning they were concerned with education, starting schools at first in their immediate vicinity and eventually throughout the province of Bengal, from Dacca and Chittagong in the east to Suri in the west; meanwhile other Baptist missionaries in connexion with Serampore ranged south-east as far as the Moluccas and north-west to Ajmer, with many intermediate stations. The climax of their educational efforts in Bengal was reached in the years 1816–18, when over 100 elementary schools were established, and also Serampore College for higher education. During these same years, however, a group of younger Baptist missionaries broke away to form a separate mission based on Calcutta, and simultaneously disputes developed between the Serampore Trio and the officials of the Baptist Missionary Society in London, which resulted in a complete separation between them in 1827. But in December 1837 the Serampore Mission found it impossible to continue, for financial reasons, and had to agree to a reunion with the BMS; Joshua Marshman, the last survivor of the original Trio—and the one mainly responsible for their educational work—died in the same month.

The Zawāyā, the lettered fraternity of the Westren Sahara, besides contributing works of merit to Arabic scholarship have also taken an active part in the evolution of Moorish oral and written folk-literature, in the subject-matter, the systemization and classification of poetic metres, the selection of Arabic verse in the various musical styles, and in the way that Islam, and in particular the ideas of the Ṣūfī orders of the Sahara and the Sudan, has become an integral part of the daily lives of the nomad and the oasis dweller alike.

In his article, ‘Some notes on the devshirme’, Dr. V. L. Ménage deals in some detail with the vexed problem of the status in law of the members of the Ottoman slave institution. His comments are directed toward what he gives as Dr. Papoulia' conclusion concering the problem, that ‘the čikma, the “passing-out” from the various training-schools, amounted to a modified manumission and bestowed a status comparable with that of the “client” (mawlā) in the classical Muslim world’. Having quoted passages from two documents of the mid-fifteenth century and a notation in the comtemporary histories of the same period, Dr. Ménage conculdes: ‘These three examples suffice to show that—in the middle years of the fifteenth century at least—a čikma did not automatically bring with it legal manumission; thus although the čikma as an institution seems to imitate the Mamluk kharj—and the term itself sounds very like a calque—it differed from it fundamentally in that the ič oghlani, unlike the Mamlūk, was not (or Perhaps not necessarily) then ceremonially manumitted’.