Like many other rhythmic terms, ‘free rhythm’ is widely enough used to be recognized as part of the vocabulary of musicology, without ever having been convincingly studied or even denned. In general, this term and its various synonyms refer to music without metrical organization. ‘Free rhythm’ is an important musical phenomenon which has been largely neglected by the field of ethnomusicology. This paper discusses the deeper theoretical and methodological problems underlying this neglect.

MY interest in Shāh Ismā'īl's poetry was aroused thirty-six years ago, when from my Ahl-i Ḥaqq friends I learnt that the Khāṭu'ī mentioned in one of their hymns was no lessa person than the founder of the Ṣafavi dynasty: Khatā'ī-dä nāṭiq oldï, Türkistanïn pīri oldï “(Godhead) came to speech in the person of Khatā'ī, (who) became the pīr of the Turks (of Āzarbāyjān)”, according to the explanation given to me.

For some time I suspected the Ahl-i Ḥaqq doctrines to be identical with the arcana of the Safavids, but later came to the conclusion that the home of the former was in Kurdistan, in the region of Sulaymānī, and that only by a kind of alliance were they related to the Ṣafavi propaganda.

It was only in 1920, in Paris, that I could carefully study a copy of Khatā'ī's dīvān (Bibliothéque Nationale, sup. turc 1307). This time my attention was attracted by the autobiographical hintsof the crowned poet and by the dialectic peculiarities of his Turkish poems. I read a paper on Shāh Ismā'īl's poems before the Sociètè Asiatique (9th December, 1921), and started on the preparation of a selection from Khatā'ī's dīvān. My work was several times interrupted.

Bengali is spoken by over 48 millions of people, and naturally it has many dialects. These dialects range themselves into four main groups—Western, North Central, Northern, and Eastern (with a South-Eastern sub-group). The morphological differences between the four groups of dialects are slight, except in the case of the South-Eastern sub-group; but considerable divergences exist in sounds and phonology. These divergences, however, are not so great as to create mutual unintelligibility among speakers of Bengali in different parts of the country, except, perhaps, in the extreme east and south-east. The language which is commonly used in literature is a ‘high’ dialect, which is composite in its inflections, although it is based mainly on West Bengali of several centuries ago. The grammar of this ‘high’ Bengali—the sādhu bhāṣā, as it is called—is archaic, and explains most of the forms of the modern dialects as presenting the prototypes of these latter; but its pronunciation and intonation vary with the different dialectal areas.

Faced with the fact that in many varieties of Arabic, including Bedouin dialects of the kind to which Sibawayhi was wont to turn, polysyllabic words and certain other unitary complexes are characterized in pronunciation by the prominence which makes one syllable stand out to the ear above the others, the linguist is understandably puzzled by the failure of the Arab grammarians to mention the subject of accentuation. Bewilderment increases with the realization not only that rules of prominence are statable for a given colloquial but also that correspondence between colloquials or between a colloquial and a given ‘Classical’ pronunciation is equally regular. Confusion is complete when the ‘rules’ given in all reference grammars of Classical Arabic are found to take no cognizance of regional differences of pronunciation and, what is worse, to bear little or no resemblance to the facts in any one region.

This article is intended as a contribution to the debate on the nature of the early Islamic state (especially 1–70 AH/622–690 AD), as regards both its government and its ideology. It presents and discusses new documentary evidence that sheds light on these subjects and tries to advance a little further the discussion of two questions that have been particularly hotly debated in recent years. These are: whether the Muslims merely continued the administrative practices of the Byzantines and Persians or introduced innovations, and why recognizably Islamic messages do not appear in the material record before the reign of the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (65–85 AH/685–705 AD). Finally, this article attempts to draw attention to the relative under-use of documents, whether papyri, coins, rock inscriptions or the like, and to illustrate the different ways in which they might be deployed to enhance our knowledge of this very important topic.

“ The warlords of twentieth–century china have received little scholarly attention.”. This omission is due, apart from the reasons viven in Mr. Sheridan's ‘Preface’, to the historical significance of the men and their period not being fully appreciated. What sort of men were they ? How did they rise to such great power? What effect did their abuse of power have on Chinese society ? Why did the May Fourth Movement, the Washington Conference, the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the reorganization of the Kuomintang, and the May 30th Movement use the misrule of the warlords as their back–drop? How far did the warlords undo the work of the restoration in the 1860“s and 19870”s ? These are but a few pertinent questions. In a period of merely 16 years (1912–28), over 1, 300 warlords had fought more than 140 provincial and interprovincial wars. Such a period is bund to be complicated but should not daunt the curiosity of the historian.

The great famine of 1870–71 was arguably the most tragic event in the modern economic and social history of Persia. Over wide areas of the country almost no rain fell during the winter of 1869/70, and in the following year only the western and southern provinces were blessed with any precipitation. Many areas did not have a single drop of rain during that two-year period. Khurāsān, Isfahān, Yazd and Fārs were particularly hard hit by the drought. In many areas dry-farming crops were wiped out, and harvests of irrigated crops were also very poor as a result of the severe depletion of surface and sub-surface water. Even the Zāyandeh-rūd, which normally contained a large volume of water, dried up.

Although Somaliland has attracted the attention of a distinguished body of Italian scholars it has not yet been subjected to a specifically social anthropological study such as the present writer hopes to make. Excellent studies notably by Puccioni (1919–1937), Cerulli (1918–1943), and Colucci (1924,1943) have elucidated the sociology of the Somali and created a sound corpus of knowledge for future investigations. Colucci's Principi di diritto consuetudinario delta Somalia Meridionale (1924) provides a penetrating analysis delineating with great clarity the general framework of Somali social organization and the political structure of the Sab tribes of Somalia in terms of lineage organization. Cerulli's studies of tribal custom and social organization are also of great value;his ‘Note sul movimento musulmano nella Somalia ’, published over 30 years ago, is at present the foundation of all studies of Islam amongst the Somali. The present paper attempts to set this and other material on Somali religion in the context of the sociological investigation of the literature of the Somali which I have made elsewhere (Lewis, 1955), and in which I have been guided by Somali informants in London. It is hoped that the procedure adopted here may be of value in suggesting the lines along which field studies of Islam amongst the Somali might profitably be conducted, and also that it may make some contribution to studies of Islam amongst tribal societies generally.

For assistance in every Kind of way to obtain the information Presented here I am in debted to Shaikh 'Abd al-'Aziz b. Muḥammad b. 'Abdulāh Āl Khalīfah, and particularly for introducing me to his friend the nawkhudhā 'Abdullāh b. Khamīs al-Shurūqī of al-Ḥidd village, situated on the south-east tip of al-Muḥarraq island, the northern island of the Baḥrain group. Al-Shurūqī entertained us to a fuwalih and took us carefully over his ḥaḍrah, explainig the technicalities involved in siting it, etc. The aerial Photographs reproduced here were made available through the Kindness of the station commander Group Captain Sanderson, R.A.F., and through the exertions of Flight-Lieutenant W. T. Wenham and his staff. I am also indebted to Eric and Beverley Fitzsimmons of the British Council for help in this and other matters

One of the main and most tempting problems for a student of Arab geographers is the analysis of their excursions into the little-explored regions on the periphery of the Islamic world, such as Eastern Europe, Central Asia, China, and India. It is a well known fact that these geographers, intent on Space, are often negligent of Time. On a sixteenth century Turkish map I have found a phantom of America stretched into the shape of a new-born moon, whereas the wastes of Siberia were still marked as the haunts of the traditional Gog and Magog. Thus, too, in the ninth and tenth centuries, the classical period of Arab geography, the scholars felt no compunction in plagiarizing one another, or borrowing from some ancient source data bearing no relation to the contemporary conditions: in the tenth century King Dahum of “common origin” still figured among, the rulers of India, although this name referred to Dharmapala, the ruler of Bengal about A.D. 800.

Isaac De Beausobre, the Huguenot author of one of the best books ever written on Manichæism (Histoire critique de Manichée et du Mani cheïsme, Amsterdam, 1734, 1739), was the one to make the only sound suggestions on the sources used by Mani for the compilation of his Book of the Giants: the Book of Enoch, and the which Kenan, a great-grandson of Noah, discovered lying in a field (vol. i, 429, n. 6). The latter work has been indentified by Alfaric (Lex Écritures Manichéennes, ii, 32) with a book whose contents are briefly indicated in the Decretum Gelasianum, p. 54, II. 298–9 (ed. Dobschütz): Liber de Ogia nomine gigante qui post diluvium cum dracone ab hereticis pugnasse perhibetur apocryphys. Of the Book of Enoch, which was composed in the Hebrew language in the second century B.C., only an Ethiopic version, a few Greek fragments, and some excerpts made by the Byzantine chronographer Georgius Syncellus survive. Mani, who could hardly read the Hebrew, must have used an Aramaic edition based directly on the Hebrew text (see below, Šhmyz'd). He quotes mainly from the first part, which Georgius S. (p. 45, EI.-R.) called “the first book of Enoch on the Egrēgoroi”, but shows himself acquainted also with the subsequent chapters.

No comprehensive study of the Ottoman fetvā has so far been carried out. Of the great many Ottoman fetvā selections in print and manuscript, very few have been published in a scholarly edition or translated into a Western language. The systematic inquiry into the application of Muslim law in the Ottoman Empire as reflected in the fetvās has hardly even begun. This article will not examine the decisions of Ottoman muftīs on specific questions of law but discuss some general aspects of the Ottoman fetvā—its form, the procedure of its composition and issuance, the subjects it deals with, the law it applies, and related matters.

My purpose in this paper is to outline a preliminary reconstruction scheme for the agreement morphology of the Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) verb. I will deal with two separable issues: the provenence of the widespread suffixal agreement paradigm, and that of a less widely attested set of prefixes. The suffixal paradigm has, since the work of Bauman (1974, 1975, 1979, see also DeLancey 1980, 1981b) been recognized by some, but by no means all, Tibeto- Burmanists as being reconstructible for PTB. The prefixes, on the other hand, are as far as I know currently universally viewed as of secondary origin (although Bauman (1975) attributes a PTB provenence to one of the morphemes involved, he does not consider it to have been part of an original agreement system). I will show, however, that there is good evidence on which to base an argument that these also are of PTB provenence, and in fact very likely older than the suffixes.

In has long been known that the chronological scheme commonly transmitted by the early Arabic sources for events of the latter half of the sixth century A.D. poses a number of major problems. These are sufficiently important to raise serious doubts about the reliability of the traditional chronological framework for the last years of the Jāhilīya in general. A key problem is that of the date for 'Ām al-fīl, the ‘Year of the Elephant’, so called after the expedition of Abraha into the Hijāz in that year. The early Arabic literary tradition does not specifically date this event: it simply maintains, first, that Muammad was born in the Year of the Elephant, and second, that he was summoned to act as God's Prophet at the age of forty. Considered together, the many reports to this effect imply―based on the prevailing view that the mab'ath is to be dated to approximately A.D. 610―that both the expedition of Abraha and the birth of Muhammad occurred in about A.D. 570.

That the dialectical technique of Muslim kalām is a borrowing from Christian theology is no secret. Its extra-Islamic origin has indeed been asserted by van Ess with great forthrightness in the context of his recent publication of an early kalām text. The text in question is an anti-Qadarite polemic ascribed to al-Hasan b. Muhammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. c. 100 A.H.); it lacks a title, but may conveniently be designated Questions against the Qadarites. Van Ess accepts the ascription, and dates the tract to the 70s of the first century of the Hijra. Since the text contains no contemporary historical reference or colour, and. the ascription rests on the sole authority of the Zaydī imāam al-Hādī (d. 298), the case for so early a dating rests heavily on the theological style and content of the tract. Many of the arguments advanced by van Ess are questionable, and the result could not be said to constitute proof. But it would be churlish to reject the case for an early dating out of hand, and difficult to sustain one later than the first half of the second century. The text is thus an archaic one, and provides an appropriate starting-point for an inquiry into the origins of kalām.

The revival of the Dhahabī order in modern Persia took place several decades earlier than that of the Ni'matullāhī through the person of Quṭb al-Dīn Nayrīzī (d. 1173/1759), the thirty-second in line from the Prophet. Nayrīzī was well-versed in all of the various Islamic sciences of his day and among his followers are counted a number of notable Shiite clerics, such as Shaykh Jaՙfar Najafī, Mullā Miḥrab Gīlānī, Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥs¯'ī and Sayyid Mahdī Ṭabāṭaba'ī (‘Baḥr al- ՙUlum’). In the Tadhkirat al-awliyā-yi Dhahabiyya, a versified history of the Dhahabī masters by Āqā Mīrẓā Bābā Shīrāzī, the studies, exploits, compositions, charismatic powers and travels of Nayrīzī are recorded in detail. Nayrīzī was also the author of numerous poetical works and prose treatises in Persian and Arabic, including Risāla-yi Faṣl al-khiṭāb, Shams al-ḥikma, Kanz al-ḥikma, Anwār al-wilāya, Nūr al-hidāya and Risāla-yi ՙIshqiyya. ‘Faṣl al-khiṭāb’, his celebrated Arabic poem of some 8,000 couplets, expounds the tenets of Akbarian theosophy and details his mystical experiences. While attacking the corruption of the Safavid clerical establishment, it records in detail the persecution endured by the Sufis and the destruction of their khānaqāhs at the hands of the ՙulamā-yi ẓāhir.5 Nayrīzī's Faṣl al-khiṭāb also apparently formed the literary model for Hādī Sabzavārā's (d. 1878) celebrated Arabic Manẓūma-yi Ḥikmat.

The re-establishment of the 'Abbāsid caliphate in Cairo after its overthrow on the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 656'1258 was, as is well known, accomplished by the Mamlūk sultan, al-Ẓāhir Baybars, who installed successively two refugee 'Abbāsids as caliphs in his capital. What is perhaps not always realized is that the two pretenders did not appear in turn and out of the blue at the beginning of Baybars's reign, and that the sultan's reasons for installing the first, al-Mustanṣir, were not identical with his reasons for installing the second, al-Ḥākim. In certain respects the official account by Baybars's court biographer, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir, needs to be supplemented and corrected.

For almost a decade I have taught the ‘Constitution of Medina’ at Cambridge as the eight distinct documents it comprises, issued on various occasions over the first seven years or so, of Muḥammad's Medinan period, using a typescript text of these documents, designated A to H. My attention was first attracted to it when reviewing the late Professor A. Guillaume's translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, because of the astonishingly close parallels with ḥawṭah treaties from Ḥaḍramawt upon which I was working about that time. Originally I had intended to publish a typical ḥawṭah agreement together with an analysis of the ‘Constitution’ which of course is not really a constitution at all. I still intend to publish my ḥawṭah corpus and demonstrate the similarity, but it has long been time to publish the analysis and identification of the separate documents contained in the ‘Constitution’, more particularly as it has important methodological and historical implications if anything approaching a definitive modern account of Muhammad's career is to be written.

The problem of the lawfulness of accepting and holding office under an illegitimate ruler posed itself in the Imāmī Shī'a from an early date. Imāmī Shī‘ism considered the historical caliphate, with the exception of the reign of 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, as invariably usurpatory and illegitimate. The rule of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet was the exclusive right of 'Alī and the Imams from among his descendants. They had been pushed aside from their rightful position, first by the three caliphs preceding 'Alī and later, by the Umayyads and the 'Abbāsids. On the other hand, the Imams from the fourth, 'Alī Zayn al-'Ābidīn, had ceased actively to seek to rule through the overthrow of the usurpatory caliphate. The sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Ṣādiq, rejected in particular any offer of help to restore him to his rightful position by force and strictly forbade his followers to engage in revolutionary activity on behalf of the Imams until the rise of the Qā'im Imam who would claim his right to rule with the sword. This quietist policy was consistently followed by his successors and came to be reflected in Imāmī belief and doctrine which did not anticipate a return of the Imams to rule before the coming of the eschatological Mahdī.

The generalization that it was during the Mamlūk period that the Copts were reduced to a small minority in Egypt is a familiar one which has been frequently repeated since Gaston Wiet broached it some 50 years ago. Using this generalization as a point of departure, I intend to review the evidence in the Arabic sources which touches upon the actual process of conversion which occurred during the period 692–755/1293–1354, attempting to discover, if possible, the extent of conversion during those years and the causes which lay behind it. The dates that I have chosen are not altogether arbitrary since they correspond, as we shall see, to certain demarcations in the history of conversion noted by Mamlūk historians themselves; furthermore, I have deliberately excluded the period of the Crusades from consideration in the belief that this period should be studied separately in order to determine whether the Mamlūks' involvement in the Crusades affected their policy toward the indigenous Christians of Egypt to any appreciable extent. Although my findings in this article tend to support Wiet's generalization, I hope to offer richer, more detailed documentation for it than has been offered heretofore and, in so doing, to contribute to our understanding of Mamlūk social history.