‘Apocalyptic’, it has been pointed out, ‘is only another word for “revelation”, and apocalyptist for “revealer”. Essentially, therefore, prophecy and apocalyptic [are] identical.’ Prophecy in its turn has been defined as ‘the declaration of knowledge which cannot be apprehended through the ordinary faculties, but is acquired either by revelation from a deity or by some other mantic power inherent in te seer himself’. Through the accidents of history a distinction came to be drawn by students of Jewish sacred literature between ancient prophecy and later apocalyptic, the latter flourishing in the intertestamental period; and in the Jewish tradition it is apocalyptic which, it has been said, ‘was the first to grasp the great idea that all history, alike human, cosmological and spiritual, is unity. … Apocalyptic sketched in outline the history of the world and of mankind, the origin of evil, its course, and inevitable overthrow, and the final consummation of all things’.

This article questions certain assumptions on the intellectual history of modern Islam and on one of the most influential modern reform movements, the Salafiyya. By looking at the Sufi origins of one of the main Salafī reformers, it relativizes the notion of an inherent anti-Sufism of this reform movement. The article examines how Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the famous Egyptian reformer, converted to Sufism in his youth after experiencing a spiritual and intellectual crisis. The influence of his paternal great-uncle Shaykh Darwīsh al-Khādir and of Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1837–1897) on ‘Abduh's spiritual and intellectual formation will be investigated. In his youth, Sufism provided him with an alternative form of religiosity with which he could express his dissatisfaction with the representatives of mainstream Islam in his time. ‘Abduh's mystical inclinations found its literary expression in his first major work, the Risālat al-Wāridāt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations), whose contents will be discussed in detail.

The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical centre and a non-prototypical periphery; and (b) primary emotive interjections exhibit the highest degree of canonicity and extra-systematicity, while the canonicity and extra-systematicity of secondary phatic interjections is lowest.

The Anglo-Saddozai government in Afghanistan was overthrown by a series of risings in 1841–2. The first of these risings was that of the eastern Ghilzai tribes, who broke the line of communīcatīons between Kabul and Jalālābād at the end of September and the beginning of October 1841. On 1 November disturbances began in Kabul and these were followed by risings in the Kohistān, in the area of Ghaznī, and, sometime later, at Qandahar. In January 1842 the Kabul garrison withdrew, under treaty, but was entirely destroyed. In March 1842 the garrison at Ghazni surrendered and was destroyed. The garrisons at Jalālābād and Qandahar held out and were reinforced from Peshawar and Quetta respectively. In August and September they advanced and reoccupied Kabul, but soon afterwards the British withdrew altogether from Afghanistan. Between January and August 1842 there was a struggle for power among the various groups in eastern Afghanistan, which ended in the victory of Muḥammad Akbar, son of Dost Muḥammad. Although Akbar and his supporters were forced to fly at the time of the reconquest they were soon able to return, resume power, and prepare for the restoration of Dost Muhammad in May 1843.

Alchemy, on the rare occasions when it has been made the subject of reasonable inquiry, has usually been studied as part of what one may call the pre-history of science. But if, to use a favourite phrase, we are to see in alchemy merely “the cradle of chemistry”, are we not likely, whatever its initial charm, to lose patience with an infancy protracted through some fifteen centuries?

It is certain in any case that another aspect of alchemy—its interest as a branch of cultural history—has hitherto been strangely neglected. Mr. Walter Scott, for example, omits alchemistic writings from his great edition of the Hermetica on the odd ground that they are merely “masses of rubbish”. But if texts are to be dismissed as rubbish because they contain beliefs that we cannot share, I see no reason why the religious and philosophical parts of the Hermetica (and with them many books which to-day enjoy a far wider popularity) should continue to claim attention.

This study presents some new observations on selected features of the phonology and morphology of the Omani Arabic dialects, and attempts to place them in a peninsula-wide typological framework. The paper is based on the results of an analysis of tape-recorded conversational data gathered in more than thirty, mainly rural locations in northern Oman between 1985 and 1987. Most of the speakers were men and women aged 35 and above with little or no formal education who, if not retired, were engaged in traditional occupations such as farming, fishing, pottery and animal husbandry. Much of the data was gathered in the context of a study of the epidemiology of rheumatic diseases conducted on a random sample of 2,000 Omanis adults by my wife for the Omani Ministry of Health, during which the subjects were interviewed by me at length in their homes or places of work.

WHILST the tonal languages spoken in West Africa have latterly received W a good deal of attention, it has not been generally realized that such languages are found also in parts of New Guinea. In New Guinea there are in fact two types of tonal languages. In one, the tones may be described as ” ornamental”, i.e. though they exist they do not seem to have semantic value, but rather to be connected with a certain type of sentence rhythm; in the other the tone systems are more definitely akin to those of Western Africa, and in such languages tones do possess semantic value. It is interesting that one at least of the latter group of languages tends also to be monosyllabic. It is hoped to provide a study of the former class of languages—at least one representative of which is also found in Northern Australia—at a later date. The present paper is occupied with the languages in which tones do have semantic value.

These languages, so far as has been observed yet, are two in number, and they are spoken along the shores of Huon Gulf, in north-eastern New Guinea. The map on p. 186 will show their locations. Both belong to the group of languages known as Melanesian, and this makes the occurrence of tones even less expected. A considerable number of other languages are spoken round about this area, and though some of these also are Melanesian, they do not seem to have developed tones. Moreover, it would seem that the use of tones in these two languages antedates the coming of the Melanesian languages, for reasons that will be given towards the end of this paper.

THE scholarly article entitled ‘Muslim institutions of learning in eleventhcentury Baghdad’ by Dr. George Makdisi deserves careful study. It is much more than a mosaic of notices of institutions and men of learning; it has a thesis running through its course, which seeks to elucidate the character of the madrasah in general and that founded by Niẓām al-Mulk in Baghdad in particular.

The common view of adoption in pre-Islamic times is that it was widespread, that adoptees were the legal equals of biological sons, and that the institution was abolished with the advent of Islam. In the first part of this study I question the first two of these views. In the second part I argue that adoption, acknowledgement of paternity and false genealogical claims are three distinct practices, although scholars often confuse one with another. I explain the differences between them, and identify the sources of the confusion. Finally, I briefly mention Islamic alternatives to adoption.

The ‘Song of Bagauda’ (WB) is apparently known to Joseph Greenberg, for he quotes two hemistichs from it in his article on Hausa prosody. He refers to the work briefly, among a list of unpublished Hausa poems as a ‘qaṣīda History of Kano’, but gives no further details of subject-matter or provenance.

The biographer al-Mālikī reports that, in the year A.H. 171, Rūh b. Hatam, the governor of the Maghrib, offered the post of qādī to ‘Abd Allāh b. Farūk, a scholar-jurist of Qairawān. ‘Ibn Farūk firmly refused the offer. The governor, however, forced him to take his seat in the mosque and ordered the litigants to address their pleas to him, Ibn Farūk weeping the while and crying to them: “Have mercy upon me, that Allah may have mercy upon you”. When he thus refused to judge, the governor ordered that he be bound and taken up to the roof of the mosque: if he should then still refuse he was to be thrown over the edge.

The Japanese language was traditionally written vertically. Recently, journals, textbooks and academic reference works have appeared with the script written horizontally. One reason for this may be that quotations of foreign names and articles (written in European languages) and mathematical equations often appear in technical texts, and it is therefore more convenient to have the main text of this kind of work written horizontally.

If there has been one dominant, quasi-official theory for Turkish classicalmusic in the second half of the twentieth century, it is that particularlyassociated with Ezgi and Arel. Their notational conventions have becomestandard, supplanting earlier norms, and the framework they developed is theone still employed in recent general accounts of the modal system, whether thesimplified introductory survey of Yilmaz (1983), for example, or the moredetailed and comprehensive coverage of Ozkan (1984). Both of these follow theanalytical models provided by their predecessors, and begin with an expositionofintervals and the various species of tetrachord and pentachord formed from them before moving on to describe the structure of the makams themselves. Thesequence interval, scale, mode, nevertheless forms a conceptual continuum: theintervals denned are restricted to those deemed to occur in Turkish classicalmusic, and the nomenclature of the various species, for all that they appear asabstract assemblages of intervals, identifies them with characteristic segments ofwell-known and important makams.

In the following, I will analyse a lost text from the Shang shu the ‘Ancient documents ’. The story recorded in this text that of an ominous portent—seven years of drought which occurred at the beginning of the Shang Dynasty, of a divination in which human sacrifice was demanded of the Shang founder Tang, and of the ritual in which he offered himself as a sacrifice to the Lord on High. I will argue that this text provides a conceptual link between the role of the king in Shang times as a medium between the spirits above and the earth below and the Zhou theory of the king as the recipient of a changing mandate of Heaven.

The student who approaches the study of the turbulent life of Ibn Taymiyya will soon realize that Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, his renowned shāfi‘ī disciple, is indeed one of the main sources for the Hanbalī scholar's biographers. Al-Dhahabī wrote many biographical notices of Ibn Taymiyya and one of these has been identified with the manuscript source presented in this article. The article briefly introduces the source, discusses its content and its importance in relation to the early biographies of Ibn Taymiyya as is evident from the text, and raises some questions about the state of consensus towards the Hanbalī jurist among his traditionalist Damascene fellows. An edition and annotated translation of the Arabic text are appended to the introduction.

The Archives of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) include a small lot of material relating to the three expeditions to western China organized and financed by Count Ōtani Kozui (1902–14), with the aim of exploring Buddhist sites. Ōtani also recognized the significance of promoting their results outside of Japan and integrating them into the international academic community, primarily Britain. Since his collection was later dispersed, the material in the RGS Archives provides valuable information on the expeditions and clarifies the context for some of the discoveries. In addition, it evidences traces of the interaction between Japanese and British scholarly circles, as an example of the complex international network of scholarship on Central Asia in the early part of the twentieth century. It also shows the efforts invested by the Japanese side in trying to have their results acknowledged as being equal to those of Western explorers.

In order to introduce Mozi's thought, almost every contemporary textbook on Chinese philosophy refers to his ten novel theses or dogmas, which have been preserved as the titles of the Core chapters (8–37): to elevate the worthy, to conform upward, to care for all, to condemn military aggression, to moderate expenses as well as burials, to acknowledge the will of Heaven and the percipient ghosts, and to condemn music as well as fatalism. Through a close reading of the Mozi and other early sources written by or attributed to masters, this paper argues, first, that these ten core ideas may not have been promoted by the earliest spokesmen of Mohism but gradually emerged while various layers of the book Mozi were written, and, second, that these ten ideas were not consistently attributed to early Mohism by Zhou and Han masters: their association of Mo with these specific mottos is limited and inconsistent. A focus on the most well-known motto – “care for all” – shows that there was no awareness of its belonging exclusively to one thinker or school. The difference between the earliest and the contemporary characterizations of Mozi sheds new light not only on early Mohism, but also on our preconceptions when reading early sources.

A Detailed analysis of single statements corroborates more and more our conviction that the elements of Hindu mentality (viz. philosophy, religion, and fine arts) are subject to certain fixed and common rules of thinking. If we acknowledge any one analytical method—of course the most general possible—as sufficient and adequate, we can presume that whatever may at any time be the object of our analysis must follow the method adopted. If we accept as a principle for the veracity of all judgments that they must be subjected to the rule of sapakṣe sattva and vipakṣe asattva, then the analysis will show that in reality all statements are measurable under the aspect of those two criteria. The only breach in this principle was made by a Jaina logical school which, while anticipating the principles of our “implication”, admits the syllogism fulfilling the anyathānupapannatva condition, i.e. it accepts as true conditional sentences of which the protasis does not reach beyond the sphere of the predicated subject (pakṣa). In other words: the argument, when predicating a fact, forms a true sentence, even if it does not predicate the class to which the fact belongs. Whilst the Buddhist syllogism oscillates between class inference and sentence calculus (sapakṣa and vipakṣa being the necessary conditions), the Jaina syllogism advances exclusively the sentence calculus, and the validity of the predication is confined merely to the implication in question.

The giving of gifts, though not peculiar to Persian society, is particularly common in that society. There are a large number of words designating gift or present. Among them are ḥadiya, ՙatiya, ṣilat, tuḥfa, ՙinayat, inՙām and pīshkash. Some implicitly define the status of the giver or the recipient. ՙInāyat implies a favour conferred by the giver; inՙām defines the superior status of the giver in relation to the recipient and often amounts to a gratuity. Pīshkash, which may originally have had a fairly neutral meaning, came to mean a present from someone of an inferior status. In the ninth/fifteenth century, if not before, it came to be used also in the sense of a due or tribute paid to the ruler or his officials. Tashrīf, pāy-andāz, taՙāruf, taṣadduq, khidmatī and taqdīmī usually signify an inferior status on the part of the one who offers the gift.

The existence of a totally indigenous Oromo writing system is not something that is very widely known about among Éithiopisants, and our present description of this remarkable achievement is written in the belief that the subject has never before received attention. Remarkable achievements are generally the achievements of remarkable men, and before embarking on a consideration of the writing system itself, it has seemed only appropriate to devote the first section of this paper to a short biographical sketch of the man who devised the system. At this point we are bound to acknowledge our great indebtedness to Shaykh Mahammad Rashād, a student of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō, who not only gave us copious information about the life of his teacher, but generously provided us with copies of a number of manuscripts, among which is one (shown in Figs. 2–5) which sets out in a clear way the principles of Shaykh Bakri's orthography. Without the Amharic and Arabic explanations of this key we should have been involved in a work of decipherment, and the present study might well have proved impossible. We are likewise indebted to Dīmā Yōnīs, who took great pains on our behalf in interviewing former students and friends of Shaykh Bakri, and subsequently translated into English and typed out the information he collected.