It is well known from relatively recent Ethiopic tradition that Ethiopia was once ruled by a queen called Gudit, Yodit, Isat or Gaՙwa, with both positive and negative characteristics. On the one hand she was a beautiful woman of the Ethiopian royal family, much like the Queen of Sheba, and on the other she was a despicable prostitute who, at a time of political weakness, killed the Ethiopian king, captured the throne, and as a cruel ruler destroyed Aksum, the capital, persecuted the priests, and closed the churches.

Received wisdom has always held that the Ottomans took little interest in events beyond their borders except when they were likely to affect them. Previous scholars have suggested that it was only when French revolutionary forces occupied the Eastern Mediterranean that the Ottomans took an interest in and then condemned the revolution. From the despatches and reports of Ebubekir Ratib Efendi, ambassador to Vienna, we discover that at least one Ottoman diplomat was sending detailed accounts of events in Paris and the reactions of governments throughout Europe. Ratib Efendi's diplomatic activities would suggest that reforms were already taking place in 1793, at least in the field of gathering intelligence. This signals a fundamental change in the psyche of the Ottoman political order.

The odes of Hafiz have been for some 600 years a source of delight to Persians, and an object of their serious study. To Europeans they have been known for less than half that time; yet here too, many scholars and poets have laboured to understand and interpret them. Much remains, no doubt, still to be done; but it is unlikely that anyone will now discover in the poems wholly new ranges of meaning, which have been hidden from generations of scholars among the poet's own countrymen. Any claim to such discovery must necessarily be subjected to the strictest scrutiny.

There is no need to explain what I mean by “Biblical Hebrew” (BH): I refer, of course, to the language of the major part of the Old Testament (OT) which is written in a Canaanite tongue clearly distinguished from the few chapters in Daniel and Ezra which are composed, or at any rate extant, in Aramaic. While we have no knowledge of the precise nature of the language spoken by the Hebrew immigrants into Canaan, it is likely that from a linguistic point of view the OT owes more to the vanquished Canaanites than to the conquering Hebrews. The latter are called 'iḇrīm already in the Patriarchal narratives (Gen. xiv, 13, xl, 15, etc.), but their language ('iḇrīṯ) is never as such mentioned in the OT. This may, of course, be owing to one of those purely fortuitous circumstances in the transmission of the ancient Hebrew vocabulary with which this paper is in part concerned. Whether yәhūḏīṯ ‘Jewish’ (2 Kings xviii, 26, Isa. xxxvi, 11, etc.), śәṗaṯ kәna'an ‘the language of Canaaan’ (Isa. xix, 18), and 'iḇrīṯ ‘Hebrew’ (first attested in the prologue to Ben Sira) are wholly identical is—as I have endeavoured to show elsewhere—not fully established.

THE following table shows: in columns 1 and 2 two separate series of personal affixes; in column 3 the present tense of the verb ‘to be’; in column 4 the personal inflexions of the present tenses of all other verbs; and in column 5 the personal pronouns in their separable forms.

Khowar, the predominant language of Chitral and of the adjacent parts of the Gilgit district, is characterized on the one hand by a tenacious preservation of ancient IA. sounds, forms, and words, and on the other hand by the existence of a remarkably large number of foreign elements. According to Sir George Grierson, Khowar “in some essential particulars agrees rather with the Ghalcha languages to the north”. And, drawing attention to the fact that the Chitral valley was formerly inhabited by Kalashas, he expresses the opinion that the originally homogeneous Dardic population of Kafiristan, Chitral, and Gilgit “was subsequently split into two by a wedge of Khō invasion, representing members of a different, but related, tribe coming from the north [of the Hindukush]”. In whatever way one may be inclined to interpret the position there can be no doubt that Kho., when compared with the neighbouring Dardic dialects, presents many peculiarities which deserve our attention.

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.

The great inscription of Darius I at Bisitun has hitherto been the only Achaemenid inscription known to exist not only in the three versions carved on the rock-face—Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian—but also in an Aramaic translation on papyrus. The fragmentary scroll containing the Aramaic text was first published by Sachau in 1911. In general, the Aramaic version agrees closely with the Babylonian and is therefore comparatively easy to interpret in spite of its poor state of preservation. However, both Sachau and all later editors have been baffled by one passage in the last column of the Aramaic text. The lines preceding and following correspond, at least approximately, to §§44 and 49 of the Babylonian: ‘King Darius states: King, whoever you are, who may arise after me, protect yourself well from lies. Do not trust the man who lies … Believe what I did and tell the truth to the people. Do not conceal (it). If you do not conceal these matters, but you do tell the people, may Ahura Mazda protect you …’. The intervening lines have not been identified up to now and their meaning has remained obscure.

Oertel, in Lectures on the Study of Language, writes (in the footnote on p. 304): “The effect of taboo on the lexicon of savage tribes deserves further investigation.”

The following study contains a translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering into Arabic of the second chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra cum commentary. (On this point see our translation of al-Bīrūnī's rendering of the first chapter of Patañjali's Yogasūtra.) This translation is based on Ritter's edition of the Arabic text. Comparison has been made with the unique MS of Ritter's text: Köprülü, 1589, folios 412a–419a (written on the margins). We have also compared the text with parallel passages and expressions in al-Bīrūnī's India. In some cases the passages in India are identical, while in others they show differences. Sometimes these differences are merely stylistic. In other cases there is a doctrinal divergence.

The present paper is an attempt to throw preliminary light on heretical Sufi groups in the Arabic-Islamic world in the early-modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). Previous scholarship on antinomian Sufism has tended to focus on earlier centuries and on Persian- and Turkish-speaking groups. Evidence suggests that there is also a history to be written of antinomian mystical groups in the Arabic-speaking world in later centuries. On the eve of modernity in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, groups and individuals existed who rejected or ignored the prevalent scholarly interpretation of Islam and challenged the authority of the class of religious scholars (ʿulamā'). A number of sources from the period, usually hostile and/or satirical, attest to the existence of such groups and allow us to reconstruct the overall contours of their outlook.

A “contextualist” reading of the Quran is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among those Muslims referred to as “progressive-ijtihadis”. One of the primary concerns of this reading is that in order to understand and interpret the ethico-legal content of the Quran and relate that content to the changing needs and circumstances of Muslims today, it is important to approach the text at different levels, giving a high degree of emphasis to the socio-historical context of the text. In the classical tafsīr this emphasis on socio-historical context was not considered important, particularly in the interpretation of the ethico-legal texts, despite the frequent use of asbāb al-nuzūl literature. In this paper, I will explore how progressive-ijtihadis are adopting a contextualist reading of ethico-legal texts of the Quran. To illustrate this, I will use one or two such texts (verses) and their interpretations by the progressive-ijtihadis and will seek to demonstrate the contours of this approach, and highlight some of the challenges this approach is facing.

R. C. Abraham's The principles of Tiv, though a teaching grammar which designedly avoids technical terms, contains the most careful and systematic treatment of the Tiv verbal system that has been published, and this and his other books are the only works on Tiv giving tonal details. But his classification of verbs, though based appropriately on their structure and tonal behaviour, is not entirely consistent, nor the most convenient basis for a clear and concise description of the whole verbal system. The present study is based on an analysis of the material provided in Abraham's books—particularly his excellent dictionary—checked and supplemented by several years' practical experience of the language in the field, and more recent detailed research with various informants in London.

The Arab Empire of the Umayyad Period is still one of the problems of history. Muslim historians, in spite of their theological prejudice against the reigning house, display a not unnatural undercurrent of pride in its triumphs of conquest. European historians of the period fall into two classes: those who regard the Empire as an organized system of government, carrying on and blending the Roman and Persian traditions, and those who see in it an organized system of exploitation, copying the older administrations only so far as they ministered to the rapacity of the conquerors.

The question under discussion here is both perplexing and easy, a paradox arising from the scarcity of precisely datable Sung bronzes. Because of the scarcity of such bronzes, art historians have not succeeded in forming a definite view about their quality, casting, and designs; however, it may be possible for specialists in other fields to say something about them. Unfortunately, records, too, are scanty. Under such circumstances, we may be justified in resorting to exogenous, namely economic, factors in the hope of finding an acceptable provisional conclusion.

The Arabic manuscript which forms a part of Majmū‘ No. 17, preserved in the ຒahirīya Library in Damascus, is the only fragment extant of a diary kept during the fifth/eleventh century by a contemporary historian of Baghdad, Abū ’Alī b. al-Bannā’ al-Ḥanbalī. An edition and translation of this fragment (hereafter referred to as the Diary) are given here for the first time. It covers in some detail a period of slightly more than one year, from A.H. 460 to A.H. 461 (corresponding to A.D. 1068–69), in the socio-religious history of Baghdad.

In the course of a recently published article, I had occasion to demonstrate, rather briefly and using a comparatively simple poem, what seemed to me a distinct pattern of symbolic allusion in the verse of Ḥāfiẓ. I suggested that this type of pattern (especially in association with certain others, which have recently engaged the attention of scholars) largely invalidated the traditional view of Persian poetry as a random shower of brilliant, but ill-assorted and uncontrolled, ‘fireworks’.

The inscription recently found in the Negev (see Y. D. Nevo, ‘A new Negev Arabic inscription’, p. 18 above) mentions one Hakim b. Abī Asmā', a mawlā of ‘Abdallāh b. 'Amr b. al-‘Āṣ. No reference to a person called Ḣakīm b. Abī Asmā could be found in any other source, literary or archaeological, for the early Islamic period. His master, ‘Abdallāh b. ‘Amr b. al-‘Āṣ, is presumably the famous scholar, son of the conqueror of Palestine and Egypt, who was from the Quraysh clan of Banū Sahm. There is a considerable amount of evidence linking both father and son to Palestine

One of the major political and social results of the Ottoman Tanzimat in Syria and Palestine during the nineteenth century was the transformation whichit wrought upon the form of rule in the towns. The era of Turkish reform notonly gave a new shape and a different content to the struggle for authorityin the Syrian city between the Ottoman government and the local forces; italso contributed largely to the crystallization and consolidation of the urbanleadership of ‘ulamā’ and a'yan, by the establishment of local councils (Majlis)in the towns, which formed the main basis of future municipal life and autonomyin the area. The internal strife in the Syrian town, although acquiring a differentcharacter during the Tanzimat period, had its roots in the pre-reform era, whena fierce contest for power took place in many cities between various forces, of which the Turkish Pasha was only one. In the eighteenth century feudsoccurred in the big cities, either between the rival Janissary units, or betweenthem and the Ashrāf militia, the descendants of the Prophet. The Pashas withtheir own forces also took part in this struggle, usually siding with one factionand seeking to establish their control.1 Involved also in this struggle were thelocal ‘iulamā’, in whose hands was the administration of justice, and the a'yān, who controlled the civil administration in the towns.2

The domain of h- and q- which are prosodic features is stated in this paper to be the radical and its immediate extensions and affixes: for example, *h(edide), eating, is phonetically elile, and *q(edade), sleeping, is phonetically date. But as in other Akan languages, especially Twi, h- and q- may prove in Nzema also to be a feature of larger pieces.