One of the few Old Persian words whose precise meaning has not yet been established is yakā-, the name of a material which was used in the building of Darius' palace at Susa. In the Great King's own words ‘it was brought (to Susa) from Gandara and Karmāna’.1 That a timber was meant appears from the Akkadian version (the corresponding Elamite sentence is missing), in which yakā- is translated by GIšMlŠ-MA-KAN-NA. Admittedly the Akkadian word is partly restored; V. Scheil, in his edition,2 printed it as [miš]-má-kan-na. However, both E. Herzfeld3 and F. W. Konig4 thought they could see the determinative GlŠ and a trace of MlŠ; at all events the preserved part of the word leaves scarcely any doubt as to the correctness of the restoration.

The Tārīkhi Qumm was originally written in Arabic by Hasan b. Muhammad b. Hasan Qumml in the year A.H. 378 (A.D. 988–9). No copy of this is known to exist. A Persian translation was made in the year A.H. 805–6 (A.D. 1402–3) by Hasan b. Alī b. Hasan b. Abd al–Malik Qummī for Ibrāhīm b. Mahmūd b. Muhammad b. Alī as–Safī. The translator states that the original contained twenty chapters and fifty sections. None of the known manuscripts, however, contains more than the first five chapters.

As a good missionary and teacher Mani knew the value of repetition. With endless pains he had elaborated a story of the world, which was to explain all phenomena, of nature and the mind, that came within reach of his knowledge. Its comprehensiveness made it so complicated that it required—and still requiresa strong effort to remember all its details. t All the greater was the need to force it, by ceaseless repetition, into the minds of those who were ready to listen to the new prophet. No doubt every one of his books and longer epistles opened with this story, which may have been the sole subject of several of them. It is therefore useless to try to identify the various accounts before us either with each other or with one of the books of which we know merely the title.

The fifteenth-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machaeras, whose Recital concerning the sweet land of Cyprus concludes in 1432, first mentions locusts thus: ‘And in 1351 the locust, with God's blessing, began to come to Cyprus (and did great damage).’ Strange as it may seem, this may have been the first visit of locusts to the island in numbers sufficient to be destructive. Soon other local chroniclers, as well as travellers, pilgrims, and merchants, joined Machaeras in recording such invasions. They may have been no surprise to the Cypriot chronicler, writing a little under a century later, but in 1351 they could well have been the cause of surprise, even terror, on the island.

The study of Muslim institutions in Persia is made difficult by a lack of documents, nor is this lack due wholly to the destruction of those that once existed. Many of the legal contracts and procedures, especially those relating to customary as opposed to shar‘ī law, were unwritten. Moreover so far as local matters were concerned the process of recording was a laborious one in Persia as elsewhere; and it must have seemed unnecessary to record what every village elder knew. Another difficulty which faces us in the study of Muslim institutions in Persia is the fact that the sources often use terms imprecisely. Some are used in both a general and a technical sense. The same term may be used to denote a number of different institutions and the meaning of any term may vary according to both time and place.

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.

The sīra authorities provide a mass of contradictory data on the chronology of the Prophet's raids and the task of fitting these inconsistencies into a cogent chronological pattern is beset with difficulties. In the main sources, for example, Mūsā b. ‘Uqba, Ibn Isḥaq, and al-Wāqidī, we find noticeable divergencies in the dating of a specific event. This is so even with important incidents such as the expulsion of Banu Qaynuqā‘and a comparatively late event such as the attack on Khaybar. A textual collation of the chronological material does suggest, however, that in some cases it may be possibleto win through to a safer position.

In Quran 2: 127 Ibrāhīm founded “the house” (most probably a reference to the Kaʿba) together with his son Ismāʿīl. This scene does not appear in the Bible and none of the attempts to find a literary precedent for it are satisfactory. This paper argues that this scene reflects post-biblical traditions concerning Genesis 22. The argument is based on a comparison of the Quran, quranic commentaries, rabbinic sources and Syriac homilies on Gen. 22. After suggesting an origin for the story, the paper analyses the ways in which the Quran adapted and appropriated the story to its needs. The replacement of Isaac with Ismāʿīl is a central point addressed in this context.

The Secret History of the Mongols (Yuanchao bishi) tells us that, after the invasion and conquest of Qipchaq and Rus'lands in 1237–40, Qagan Ögödei placed ‘daruγačin and tammačin’ over peoples whose main cities were Ornas, Saḳsīn, Bulgar and Kiev.

This article examines the role of petitions to the Sultan concerning private disputes in the legal system of Ottoman Egypt during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Previous studies have seen petitioning as a means for subjects to complain about abuses carried out by Ottoman officials: few scholars have engaged with the many petitions involving private disputes between subjects. Based on both original petitions and Ottoman bureaucratic records, this article consists of two parts and an appendix. Part 1 describes the petitioning process, including the procedure followed by the imperial palace when handling petitions. Part 2 analyses the various ways in which sending a petition could affect the outcome of a dispute. The appendix features a reproduction and transcription of a petition which has been annotated by several palace officials, illustrating its progress through the palace bureaucracy.

An important phonological feature of many of the dialects of Arabia is the pronunciation of . This sound change is not confined to one dialect group, and unlike the affrication of and is non-conditioned. The evidence whether > in Classical Arabic or in the ancient dialects is rather inconclusive, and exceptin a few authors it is not categorically stated to be a sound change in the way that this is stated, for example, of 'aj'aja (iy[y] > ij[j] mainly in pause) for the dialect of the Tamīm.

While interest in early exegetical works concerned with the Qur'ān has certainly increased in the last few decades, no clear consensus seems to have emerged concerning how to establish the genesis of a supposedly early text. The basic problem to be faced is whether the texts we have today are compilations extracted from later works and then put in the name of a single, early authority or whether they are genuinely transmitted works from early teachers and writers, albeit with the definite possibility of some reformulation and intrusion from a later date by editors and copyists. The question to be discussed is one of both the date and method of composition.

The well-known Turkish scholar Kilisli Raf'at, to whom we owe the publication of Kāshgharī's monumental Dīwān lughat al-Turk, was fortunate in discovering a short but important work in Persian, which throws an unexpected light on the military and civil organization of the Aq-qoyunlu state in the reign of Uzun Hasan (A.D. 1466–1478). The original of the ‘Arḍ-nāma (“Account of the Parade”) forms one of the twenty-one items of MS. 1438 of the Ḥamdīya Library in Stambul which contains the complete works (kulliyāt) of Jalāl al-dīn Muḥammad b. As'ad Davānī (A.H. 830–908/ A.D. 1427–1502). This learned theologian, poet, and moralist is particularly known in the west by his Akhlāq-i Jalālī compiled at the request of Sulṭān-Khalīl, who was governor of Fars on behalf of his father Uzun-Ḥasan. The ‘Arḍ-nāma is a further proof of

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 the cold December of 1906 I was returning from Borūjerd to Tehran. At every village on the road I inquired whether there existed any local curiosities. At Kondūrūd I was told that the inhabitants belonged to the Turkish Khalaj tribe and spoke Khalajī. I had only a couple of hours to jot down a few sentences in the dialect which struck me by its unusual features. It was too late to call back my men who, by that time, had gone ahead, and I had to content myself with the hope that some Khalaj might turn up in the capital. Indeed I had an inhabitant of “Khalajestān” brought to me from the bazaar only to discover that he spoke an Iranian dialect. I revisited Solṭanābād in 1917 in circumstances of war. At my request, the governor's men got hold of two Khalaj villagers, but the latter were so frightened that the official summons might mean some trouble in store for them that they hardly answered my questions and most pathetically asked me to let them go in peace.

The most detailed account of Mani's last days is contained in the Coptic “Narrative on the Crucifixion” (Polotsky, Man. Hom., pp. 42 sqq.). As I had occasion to point out before, this “Narrative” had been quoted by the Christian Jibrā'īl b. Nūḥ in his anti-Alanichaean book which was still available to al-Bērūnī (Chronology, 20819–22).

During the brief reign of King Hormizd Mani went to Babylonia, where he stayed until the accession of Bahram I. After some time he left Babylonia and slowly travelled down the River Tigris, visiting his communities on the way. He reached Hormizd-Ardašīr (Ahwāz, Sūq al-Ahwāz), one of the four chief towns of Susiana, from where he started on a journey to the north-eastern provinces of the Sasanian empire. But he was forbidden to go there and compelled to turn back to Susiana. From Hormizd-Ardašīr he journeyed to Mesene, thence up the River Tigris in a boat to Ctesiphon. From the capital he went to “the Pargalia”, where he was joined by Bαατ. He travelled to Kholassar, and from this town he reached Belapat, where he was destined to die. The route taken by him on the journey from Kholassar to Belapat is not known, as there is a gap in the manuscript. While the situation of “the Pargalia” remains unsettled, that of Kholassar (Khalasar) is well defined by a comparison of the itinerary given by Isidorus Kharacenus with the Arab geographers (journey from Ctesiphon to Holwan):—

The Arabic geographical literature of the Middle Ages used several terms to indicate limits and frontiers, including āfāq, ḥudūd and tukhūm. For the external frontiers of Islam itself the term most commonly used was thughūr (sg. thaghr). And among these it was the Arab-Byzantine frontier, which to some was the frontier par excellence, which came closest to having a nomenclature peculiar to itself. In this essay I wish to demonstrate that this nomenclature, and the picture which we have of this region, do not derive from administrative history so much as from a series of superimpositions made by medieval writers on geography and related subjects. I intend to follow Professor Wansbrough's lead, by showing the consequences of the ‘use by many of the same (limited) sources of information’. I also wish to emphasize that differences over how things are to be named reflect conflicts over who is to have power over them.

Papyri from Egypt constitute the largest body of contemporary documentary evidence for the reign of Muʿāwiya. Most notable among them are the 107 texts in the archive of Flavius Papas, a local official of Upper Egypt in the 670s. Most are in Greek and provide insight into the administration, society and economy of a provincial centre. Since many deal with taxes and requisitions, they illustrate the incessant demands of the Islamic regime in Fusṭāṭ and the way local officials dealt with them. In particular, the archive shows the importance of Egypt for providing the men, materials and supplies essential for the war fleet of the caliphate. A few other documents from Upper Egypt hint at the economic role of the Church. This is the first of two parts, the second dealing with Middle Egypt, Fusṭāṭ and Alexandria.

The Al-Fatāwā al-Hindiyya Al-ʿĀlamjīriyya is a compendium of Islamic Ḥanafi law. It was written in South Asia during the second half of the seventeenth century with the goal of filling the gap between local social reality and Islamic legal theory. In order to establish an authoritative ruling, the authors compared the views of Central Asian scholars on Ḥanafi law, like those from Balakh and Bukhārā, with the opinions held by the Iraqi scholars, in particular Abū Ḥanīfa and his two disciples. This paper argues that the South Asian scholars shared more similarities with their Iraqi colleagues than with the Central Asian branch of the Ḥanafi school of law, although the latter were closer to them chronologically than the Iraqi scholars. Furthermore, the South Asian scholars' “permissive” point of view regarding non-Muslim residents may be ascribed to the pressure of the social reality in South Asia, which pushed them to search for a compromise between the population's ruling Muslim minority and the non-Muslim majority.