Kalam Kohistani is a Dardic language spoken in the upper parts of the Swat and Panjkora valleys (Swat Kohistan and Dir Kohistan), in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. In the literature, the language is known by different names, the most familiar of which are Garwi and Bashkarik. The name Garwi occurs in the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI, 8/2: 507ff.), while Bashkarik is used by Morgenstierne (1940), which is the standard reference on the language to date.

Since the publication of Professor J. Takakusu's ‘Life of Vasubandhu by Paramārtha’ in the year 1904, several scholars have made attempts to determine the date and works of Vasubandhu. The problem is beset with several difficulties. Tradition gives three dates (A.N. 900, 1000, and 1100) based on different reckonings of the Nirvana era. Vasubandhu, himself a Sautrāntika, is the author of the celebrated Vaibhāsika work, viz., the Abhidharma-kox015B;a (and its Bhāṣya), and is at the same time credited with the authorship of several major works of the Vijñānavāda school. The problem is rendered more complex by the mention in Yaśoṁitra's Sphuṭārthā Abhidharma- kośa-vyākhyā of an elder (Vṛdāhacārya) Vasubandhu, leading to a recent theory of two Vasubandhus advocated by Professor E. Frauwallner.

‘The life and achievements of Saladin constitute one of the great moments in the history of the crusades. In literature he appears most frequently as a conquering hero, who fought his enemies victoriously and in the end beat them to a standstill. But a closer examination of his actual life reveals him not only as a conqueror, but as a man who struggled with enemies of his own side who finally joined him and fought along with him under his sole command. From this angle we see him as a man who fought for his ideals, and fought, not victoriously, but in a measure that fell short of his hopes and ambitions’.

Although until recently no study had been undertaken to investigate the poetry included in Ibn Isḥāq's Sīra with a view to establishing on internal evidence the authenticity of such of it as may be genuine and revealing the spurious character of the forgeries, doubts as to the authenticity of this poetry in general or of certain poems in particular have been expressed by various writers, critics or other persons, since the time of Ibn Ishaq himself. Internal evidence attesting to the spurious character of the different poems varies widely from the immediately obvious, such as ascribing to a Himyarite king lines in simple plain Arabic or ascribing to a polytheist a poem allegedly attacking the Prophet and the Muslims which yet speaks of him in reverential terms and of his companions with respect, to the more subtle. The purpose of this article, however, is to survey and comment on some of the opinions which directly or indirectly stigmatize the poetry of the Sira in whole or in part as spurious.

In connexion with Professor Wittek's article ‘Devshirme and sharī'a’ in BSOAS, xyn, 2, pp. 271–8, a passage in Idrīs Bitlīsī's Hasht bihisht is of interest, for there the author, far from feeling any incompatibility between the devshirme and the sharī'a, even shows the former as justified by the latter.

The first part of this paper discussed a large collection of documents from Upper Egypt illustrative of society and economy in the time of Muʿāwiya. Here, further papyri, of pagarchs of Arsinoe, present supplementary information about grain production, taxation, great estates, the postal service and the role of the church in the local economy. Information about Fusṭāṭ and Alexandria depends on literary sources and archaeology. Fusṭāṭ, which started as a camp, became more organized and controlled under Muʿāwiya's governors when the main shipyard was moved there. Alexandria, despite romantic descriptions, was at least partly ruined. Like Fusṭāṭ, it was the seat of a major garrison. Taken together, the evidence from Egypt shows much administrative continuity from Byzantine times, but with important new taxes and requisitions and a tighter central control. It suggests that Muʿāwiya ran a sophisticated and effective state.

The literary genres of nawrīyāt and rauḍīyāt, the description respectively of flowers and gardens, figure amongst those most cultivated by Hispano-Arab poets, and it would be superfluous to identify all the poets who found in a garden the most congenial source of their inspiration. One case must suffice: that of Ibn Khafāja, styled al-jannān ‘the gardener’ on account of the predilection he showed for this genre. Just as the full understanding of Graeco Raman poetry is impossible unless the reader know what such plants as laurel, ivy, and myrtle signifed to the ancients, the study of Arab gardening is important in superlative degree for the correct interpretation of Arabic poetry. But this is not the only point of contact between gardening and literature: for, by strange coincidence, the normalk critical procedure used in analysing a work of literature, namely to consider it under its dual aspect of form and content, is equally aplicable to garden design and we purpose here first to discover the plan or form of the Hispano-Arab garden and then examine its content or flora.

Many Arabic geographical texts from the medieval period portray the oecumene as comprising seven latitudinal climes. In general the middle clime, in which the majority of Muslim territories were located, was viewed as possessing the best environmental conditions, which progressively deteriorated the further one travelled north or south of this central territory. This theory of the climes was combined with ideas of humoral pathology in order to argue that those living in the central zones of the oecumene received numerous physiological and psychological benefits. Conversely, those like the Africans and the Turks, living at the peripheries of the oecumene, had neither rationality nor proportionate physiognomies because their humours were distorted by the harsh environmental conditions of these regions. This article, however, seeks to nuance the outline given above. While secondary studies have generally been happy to adopt uncritically this superficial understanding of the medieval Islamic worldview, which is gained from skimming the introductions to a few geographical works, few have questioned what (and where) is meant by the centre of the world, where did human habitation supposedly end, and was the medieval understanding of the seven climes uniform. These are some of the questions posed by the present investigation. I then go on to assess how far the notions derived from the theory of the climes were implemented in ethnological accounts of the inhabitants of the far north and south. In doing so I shall conclude that the standard conception of the medieval Islamic worldview masks numerous disagreements and debates in the writings of medieval scholars.

It is well known that the Khārijites rejected genealogical qualifications for the caliphal office. As they saw it, the most meritorious Muslim should be elected whatever his ethnic origins might be; personal merit overruled considerations of descent. Modern Islamicists regularly imply that they also held personal merit to overrule considerations of status libertatis: the Khārijites allegedly held the most meritorious Muslim to be eligible for the caliphal office ‘even if he were a black/Ethiopian slave’. But this has long been known to rest on a mistake. The mistake goes back to Goldziher who based himself on a Prophetic tradition exhorting the believers to obey the amīr ‘even if he be an Ethiopian slave (‘abd ḥabashī); but as Goitein and Lewis have pointed out, the tradition in question has nothing to do with Khārijite views on the caliphate. So why does the claim persist? The answer is that al-Shahrastānī also credits the Khārijites with the tenet that the imām may be a black slave (‘abd awḥar), or at any rate a slave (Cureton's text has ‘abd aw ḥurr).

This article examines how and why non-Muslim dhimmīs were employed in a variety of important posts during the ʿAbbāsid period, notably as viziers (wuzarā') and secretaries (kuttāb). One of the aims is to show that Jews and Christians were employed in the state administration to the extent that some of them were able to achieve the second highest office after the caliph: the vizier. It is argued that, despite certain legal restrictions outlined by Muslim jurists, dhimmī employment in the government had long been an established policy. The first section discusses the juristic debate on whether non-Muslims could be appointed to public office. The second examines examples of non-Muslim viziers and the nature of their political power. The final section offers possible explanations as to why non-Muslims were needed to help the caliphs administer this governmental office. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the significance of this study for the discussion of the nature of state–religion relations in early Islam.

D. H. Müller says of the Śheri poems which he published in 1907 that they are ‘in einem älteren Mehri-Dialekt abgefasst, der dem Überlieferer nicht ganz verstandlich war’. He goes on to say that despite his best efforts he has not been able to make complete sense of all of the poems he wrote down.

Awld Jbir, the sons of Jbir, were eminent religious teachers in the Nilotic Sudan during the later part of the sixteenth century. Apart from their own importance, they and their kinsmen by blood and marriage formed a complex group of religious families. Information concerning numerous members of this clan is provided by the collection of biographies of Sudanese holy men known as the Ṭabaqtof Wad Ḍayfallh, which is the main source used in the present article. Two uncritical editions were published in Cairo in 1930.1

The chapter about innovations in mosques in al-TurtŪshī's Kitāb al-hawādith wa-'l-bida‘ contains a remarkable tradition about the building of the mosque of the Prophet in Medina which deserves special attention. This tradition, not included in the orthodox collections of hadith, is of considerable importance: it seems to belong to a large body of early traditions omitted by later collectors of hadīth, and it may throw some light on an attitude of the Prophet which was later ignored by Muslim scholars. This tradition may help us to understand the views and opinions of the early Muslim scholars.

The normal method of settling questions of inheritance in Babylonia was not by testament but according to a division among the male heirs. In legal terms, then, inheritance was normally ab intestato in Babylonia. The regulation of the size of the portions of the various heirs in a family varied according to local custom and regulation. Testaments are known sporadically from Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian sources but are not found among the documents from Babylonian proper. In place of testaments we find posthumous regulations of inheritance among the heirs and parental regulation of inheritance by means of gift, i.e. donatio mortis causa. Such documents are infrequent, and we must assume, not only that normal inheritance was ab intestato, but also that frequently, and perhaps as a general rule, the parental estate was administered jointly by the heirs.

THE paradigms that may be set up for the nominals in Tigrinya1 in terms of the category of number (established on syntactical and further morphological grounds) consist of two members, conveniently termed ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. The morphological analysis for the forms placed in this grammatical relationship may, for some of them, be given in terms of ‘external flection’ or ‘sumxation’, but for many forms, including those in commonest use, the differences of syllabic pattern, and other differences throughout the entire forms, justify the use of the traditional term ‘broken plural’. It is the purpose of this paper to make a phonological analysis to handle the morphological relation between the broken plurals and the singular forms with which they are grammatically paired.

The Islamic institution of the ribāṭ appears to have made its initial appearance along the North African coast, in what is today Tunisia, during the second/eighth century. In the first phase of its development, the ribāṭ was essentially a fortress located at a sensitive point along the Islamic frontier, garrisoned by pious individuals who envisaged their vocation as participation in the jihād, the defence of the lands of Islam against external foes.

This article takes as its point of departure the conclusions drawn in Professor Arberry's paper “Orient Pearls at Random Strung”. It is hopefully intended both to add to those conclusions in their own sphere of poetical criticism and to suggest something of the relevance of the problem as a whole in the broad structure of Persian thought. (It seems scarcely necessary to add that the extent to which that will imply Islamic thought and Eastern thought generally is, in every sense of the word, incalculable.)

The attribution of the book to al-Farabi rests solely on the note on the flyleaf, which can, however, be shown to be spurious. Examining the manuscript some years ago, I noticed that the fly-leaf was pasted over the recto of the first folio of the manuscript, and that underneath some writing was faintly visible. The fly-leaf was then separated from the folio of the manuscript, and the recto of the folio turned out to be in effect the title-page of the manuscript.

It was Harold Fleming who first drew the attention of linguists to the Bayso language. Reports concerning the existence of such a people on Gidicho Island in Lake Abaya go back to the beginning of the century and descriptions of various cultural and economic aspects of the life of the Bayso and other inhabitants of Gidicho appeared subsequently; but concerning the language nothing was available until the publication of Fleming's germinal article in 1964. The latter followed a brief period of work on the island with a Bayso speaker. The 216-item vocabulary list and brief indications of the grammar have nevertheless proved tantalizingly suggestive to everyone working on questions of genetic relationships within Cushitic. Alongside the Bayso material the article also presented the first data on the Rendille language of north-east Kenya. Fleming's conclusions that Bayso, Rendille, Boni, and Somali constitute a Macro-Somali group were seen as linguistic support for H. S. Lewis's hypothesis of a south Ethiopian (rather than a northern Horn of Africa) origin for the Somali. Since the initial presentation of these proposals, linguistic research into the Dasenech (Galab), Elmolo, and to a limited extent Arbore, languages has led German linguists to propose an extension of Fleming's Macro-Somali to include these languages. Until very recently the limited nature of the data available on many of the relevant languages had tended to detract from the strength of arguments about their internal relationships. Heine's reports of his recent researches on Rendille, Elmolo, and Boni, as well as his work on the diachrony of the ‘Sam languages’ have done much to advance our knowledge. To date, however, the material available on Bayso has remained restricted to what was presented by Fleming in 1964. The primary purpose of the present paper is to set out the results of research conducted for a period of 17 days during September 1976.