For more than a millennium, cow slaughter has been a source of bitter contention in South Asia. Hindus revere the animal; Muslims like to eat it and, until recently, the cow has been the preferred animal of sacrifice at the Islamic festival of ‘Id-ul-Adha¯. This paper looks at how, over the twentieth century, Indian governments of differing type and ideological colour—British and princely during the late colonial period and Congress nationalist after 1947—have tried to mediate this vexed question. It finds that while policies differed widely, there was a tendency for all governments in the early twentieth century to be guided by social custom and local opinion, so that in the small Muslim-ruled state of Mangrol, which had an official ban, the Muslims who killed cows occasionally for food were never prosecuted so long as they kept their activities discreet—but this ‘discretionary’ option became politically unviable once the country embraced democracy.

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.)

In the following pages an attempt is made to give as comprehensive J- a list as possible, and to discuss some important features of the eras and calendars which have been or are still being used in the Muḥammadan East since the early years of Islam up to the present day, as well as of those occurring in the books of the Muslim authors. This is, however, not claimed to be complete and can by no means be considered as an exhaustive survey of all the different calendars used here and there in the Near East in Islamic times, though sometimes only for a short period or in a limited area. Many a great and famous ruler had the ambition to found an era in his own name or to reform the calendar in general use in his time. I will content myself with a simple mention of the name, or a very brief description of the eras or calendars which are sufficiently well known in all details, as well as of those concerning which we have very little information, but will try to discuss those which, in spite of the existence of ample materials relating to them, are comparatively little known or about which difference of opinions exists.

This article includes a line-by-line translation and textual analysis of the Warring States period Chu script bamboo slip manuscript, Zigao 子羔. It argues that the manuscript differs from the transmitted Confucian tradition, but would have been considered a ru 儒 (“Confucian”) text. Unusual features include: (1) The disciple is Zigao, who is described negatively in the Lun yu. (2) The term tian zi 天子, “son-of-sky/heaven” is used literally, to refer to the divinely conceived progenitors of the three royal lineages. (3) The term san wang, “three kings”, refers to these progenitors rather than the founding rulers. (4) Confucius advocates abdication. (5) The progenitors of the dynastic lineages, rather than the founding rulers, are juxtaposed to Shun 舜, who received the rule from Yao because of his merit. A Chinese edition, with direct transcriptions and alternative readings of the Chu script graphs, is appended.

In this article I provide a complete translation and analysis of the recently unearthed bamboo manuscript, Rong Cheng shi, from the Shanghai Museum collection. This manuscript presents a previously unknown version of China's early history from the time of legendary rulers Yao, Shun, Yu and their predecessors to the establishment of the Zhou dynasty. The narrative is critical of both the dynastic principle of rule and “righteous rebellion”, and advocates instead the ruler's abdication in favour of a worthier candidate as the best mode of rule; in addition, it hints at the unusually active role of “the people” in establishing the supreme ruler. Moreover, despite being associated with the southern state of Chu, the Rong Cheng shi presents a unitary view of the past, which rejects the multi-state world and promulgates the notion of the unified “All-under-Heaven” as singularly legitimate. The text has far-reaching significance in terms of both history of Chinese political thought and of early Chinese historiography.

In an earlier issue of BSOAS I published some notes on an interesting feature of the Socotri language, namely that certain imperfect forms lack the t-prefix which marks 2nd and certain 3rd person forms in Semitic languages.

The J(ibbāli), or Śherí, language of Dhofar also exhibits this negative feature, and in much the same series of forms; principally the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional forms of causative verbs, intensive-conative verbs, quadriliteral verbs and passive verbs.

Needless to say the Amharic speakers also have close contact with the speakers of the other Semitic Ethiopic languages as well as of the Cushitic languages. Nearly all the Semitic Ethiopic and Cushitic languages have many Arabic loanwords for the same reasons mentioned above in connexion with Amharic. It is, therefore, often difficult to know whether an Arabic loanword in Amharic came directly from an Arabic dialect or through the intermediary of another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language. Since we have no adequate means at our disposal for a historical treatment of the Semitic Ethiopic vocabulary, we shall most probably never be able to determine the precise origin of some of the words considered here as borrowings, that is to say whether they come directly from an Arabic dialect or through another Semitic Ethiopic or Cushitic language.

The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

A study of the poetry of the Sīra shows that a high proportion of it is the work of more or less professional forgers who supplied narrators with poems especially prepared to suit the narrative and appeal to the audience whose outlook towards the events of early Islam had undergone considerable change. Two or three generations after the final victory of Islam and the death of the Prophet, the persons as well as the events of that era were becoming part of pasthistory. Past events had begun to take a different form and when viewed acrossthe years they appeared like a panorama in which only certain high points werevisible, and different landmarks were differently placed in relation to each other. Time had produced a shift of interest and a change in outlook, andcertainpersons were becoming more legendary and less human.

PŪr-i BahĀ (probably Tāj al-dīn, son of Bahā al-dīn) was a contemporary of the Mongol il-khan Abaqa (663–80/1265–82), son of Hulagu, and was closely associated with the family of great statesmen, Juvaynī. He is now a forgotten poet and the information available hitherto has been scarce. Even the most accurate editor of the history of ‘Alā al-dīn Juvaynī forgot to mention Pūr-i Bahā, among the panegyrists of the Juvayni family. Yet Pūr-i Bahā enjoyed a considerable reputation in his day. According to Hamdullah Mustaufā (Tārīkh-i Guzīda, 816) his dīvān was well-known (mashhūr), and Waṣṣāf (see below) readily quoted his verses.

The language of Zanzibar par excellence is Swahili, and Zanzibar may be said to be the home of this language, not in the sense that its oldest form is spoken there, but because the Zanzibar dialect has come to be known best, owing to the writings of such men as Steere, Madan, Sacleux, and, to some extent, Krapf, though his dictionary is mainly devoted to the Mombasa dialect. Also in the days of the opening up of Africa, explorers and traders generally fixed up their caravans in Zanzibar, and these porters and soldiers journeyed into the far interior, some of them remaining there and thus making Swahili a lingua franca understood, as Steere says, along the coasts of Madagascar and Arabia, and in Central or inter-Tropical Africa, as well as by the Seedees (Sidis) in India.

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.

In two recent articles in the Transactions of the Philological Society the problem of Dravidian words in Sanskrit has been discussed, and a considerable number of etymologies have been presented.1 Roughly 170 Sanskrit words of Dravidian origin are dealt with in the two articles. There remains an even larger amount of material which has not been touched on in the above two articles, and the bulk of this is brought together in the list of etymologies proposed here. The present article contains 315 items, involving a larger number of words since several words may be treated together, bringing the total number of Dravidian words in Sanskrit dealt with in the three articles to well over 500. This is a very considerable number, and shows that the extent of Dravidian influence on Sanskrit has always been underestimated rather than overestimated. It by no means exhausts the field, and another supplementary list will eventually be necessary. When the subject has been fully dealt with, it is unlikely that the total list of Dravidian words in Sanskrit will be less than 750, and it may well turn out to be considerably more.

This monograph was originally intended as a continuation of “Swahili Phonetics”, which appeared in African Studies, vol. 1, nos. 2 and 3, 1942, but war-time typographical difficulties rendered publication impossible then. I am very grateful to the editor of the S.O.A.S. Bulletin for publishing it now. Although it may be read as a separate monograph, some knowledge of Swahili phonetics is necessarily taken for granted, and I have numbered the paragraphs as from the end of “Swahili Phonetics”, so as to allow for cross-reference to that article.

In her deconstruction of the category ‘ritual’, Bell (1992: 6) suggests that all theoretical discourse on this subject is based on the opposition between thought (beliefs, symbols and myths) and action (the enactment of such cultural templates). Bell further demonstrates that this basic distinction has generated two other homologized structural patterns in ritual theory. In the second pattern, (represented in the works of Durkheim, Tambiah and Turner), there has been an attempt to produce a synthesis of the initial dichotomy. In the third pattern (represented in the studies of Geertz), this opposition and integration has led to another permutation of the original pattern, in which ‘ritual participants act, whereas those observing them think’ (Bell, 1992: 28).

Arab historical writing was not a specialized study in the seventeenth century. Organized work in Arabic and Islamic studies was still a recent development in western Europe generally. The first modern English Arabist, William Bedwell (1562–1632), was during most of his life an isolated figure: the principal result of his studies was an Arabic lexicon which was never printed, although he bequeathed the MS to Cambridge with a fount of Arabic type for that purpose. In the third decade of the century, however, some younger scholars began to interest themselves in Arabic.

The early imperial period was a time of rapid change in medical ideas and practices in China. Manuscripts and artifacts excavated from tombs of the second century B.C. along the Yangtze river valley bring fresh insights into some of the processes involved in medical innovation in the early centuries of the empire. Through examining exorcistic practices and petty surgery to the refinement of a body sustained and nourished by physiological essences, this paper describes recurring patterns found in the changing medical techniques associated with stone, be that lancets, hot pressing stones or mineral prescription. After the transition to a culture of applying fine metal acupuncture needles vestiges of these treatments found in early Chinese stone culture remain enshrined in both the theory and practice of canonical medicine.

Plural markers in some languages are quite unlike their Indo-European counterparts in that their use does not depend only on number but also on other considerations (pragmatic, perspective-related and so on). This article gives an insight into how such plurals work, based on a careful analysis of the suffix -men in Mandarin Chinese.

The notion of personal collective is what universally underlies the so-called plural of personal pronouns. Benveniste (1966) has shown that in this case pluralization does not amount to an addition or multiplication of elements, but to what he calls ‘amplification of persons’, that is, a collective. In Chinese it is this pronominal plural that has been extended, under certain conditions, to nouns.

It is claimed that the occurrence of -men is governed by the conjunction of number (n>1) and person (reference to a subject-origin). Grammatical person is taken to refer to the space (and positions within it) organized around a subject-origin, normally the speaker. -Men requires that entities be related to a human locator who performs the role of the deictic centre and acts as the origin of point of view. The required conditions are by definition met with personal pronouns, which is why -men is obligatory, but are seldom satisfied with nouns, which is why the latter take the suffix only rarely. Most remarkably, when nouns are not reducible to pronouns, the occurrence of -men is associated with a shift in perspective. The group is considered from the point of view of a locator distinct from the speaker, not from that of the speaker. The speaker being essentially free to shift his viewpoint or not, this explains why -men is optional (though not arbitrary) with nouns in such contexts. Note that, all else being equal (n>1), the contrast between N and N-men is not one of number but of point of view (external versus internal point of view). In summary, the suffix operates in all cases with reference to a subject-origin, either the speaker or a protagonist whose point of view is provisionally adopted by the narrator.

The case of Chinese, far from being exotic, is a meaningful illustration of the interaction between the grammatical categories of number and person. This study opens up new typological perspectives in terms of grammaticalization of the pronominal versus nominal plural across languages.