In the fourth chapter of book  of the Metaphysica Aristotle deals with the principle of contradiction. This law is formulated as follows: ‘it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be’. Let us imagine, says Aristotle, that somebody wished to oppose this view. Our opponent cannot hold a view which contradicts the law of contradiction without assuming the validity of this law itself: for otherwise he is not even denying what we are saying. The only alternative for him, then, will be to say nothing. But this is absurd: of which one line may be quoted here:

The ‘problem of myth’ for Western philosophers is a problem of interpreting the meaning of myths and explaining the phenomenon of myth making. The ‘problem of myth’ for the sinologist is one of finding any myths to interpret and explaining why there are so few—for myth-making is generally assumed to be a universal faculty of mankind. One explanation for the paucity of myth in the traditional sense of stories of the supernatural in ancient Chinese texts is the nature of Chinese religion. In China, gods, as well as ancestors and ghosts, were believed to be dead men, spirits who had lived in this world at a certain place and time and continued to need sustenance from the living and to exert influence over them. They related primarily to those who gave them ritual offerings and little thought was given to any possible interaction between them

From the medieval confrontation between the Muslim world and Christendom to the present day, the moral and social institutions of the respective “ other” have been the subject of close cross-cultural attention. In particular, questions related to sexual morality, including the issue of homosexuality, were, and still are, used as a polemical focus for mutual denigration.

The Islamic system of succession is destructive of family property in that it causes its division among a great number of heirs and into uneconomic units. Succession involves a great number of participants; qur'ānic and agnatic heirs participate simultaneously (not successively)—subject, of course, to the rules of priorities and exclusions—and this increases the fragmentation of the property and the shrinking of the shares of the participants ad infinitum. Islamic law does not know the principle of primogeniture. Succession is not limited to direct descendants but includes relatives of different parentelas and different degrees of kinship to the deceased.

The rapid pace of the change sweeping through the Arab world over the last few decades has profoundly affected both its various cultural products and its writers' perception of their national identity, social role and the nature of literature. The aim of this paper1 is to discuss the major changes in the sociopolitical reality of the Arab world, the cultural frame of reference and the responses of one of the major literary genres in modern Arabic literature: the novel. It is assumed here that there is a vital interaction between the novel and its socio-cultural context, in that novels encode within their very structure various elements of the social reality in which they appear and within whose constraints they aspire to play a role. Their generation of meaning is enmeshed in a variety of cultural, psychological and social processes, and their reception therefore brings into operation an array of experiences necessary for the interpretive act.

The accumulation of knowledge concerning the Semitic languages of Ethiopia has reached a stage when one may wish to venture upon a systematic comparative investigation of this linguistic group. Such an attempt is E. Hetzron's Ethiopian Semitic: studies in classification, which represents, in terms of genetic classification, the most detailed and penetrating comparative study hitherto undertaken in this field. The book is somewhat more ambitious than its subtitle would suggest; in fact it offers a fairly comprehensive exposition, well reasoned and carefully elaborated, of a new classification of the Ethiopian Semitic languages. And, as already argued a century ago, ‘in the field of cognate languages, classification is but a “modification” of the history of a language’, since ‘eo ipso the history of language turns into a genetic classification’, or, as postulated in a more recent study, ‘the establishment of valid hypotheses concerning genetic relationships among languages is a necessary preliminary to the systematic reconstruction of their historical development’. The Ethiopian language area is sometimes mentioned as especially convenient for the comparativist. Indeed, ‘the field is inexhaustible and exceptionally fascinating’, as it comprises a rich variety of languages, dialects and ‘sub-dialects’’, Semitic and non-Semitic, spoken side by side in adjacent regions and at various substrata. However, such a linguistic situation is not necessarily favourable for applying the genealogical-comparative method, especially as regards interrelations between close, and rather fragmented, dialects.

The term ‘Object Marker’ is used to refer to analytic particles or prepositions which signal the direct object status of a nominal. These are attested in a variety of forms in Semitic languages. For instance: 'eṯ, which is used in Hebrew and in the language of the Moabite stone, 'yt, which is attested in Phoenician and also in early Aramaic (e.g. Zakir inscription 5; Sefire I B/32, III/11, III/13; Aššur Ostracon 6). wt, which is found with a 3rd person pronominal suffix in the Old Aramaic Hadad inscription 28. yt, frequently employed in the Aramaic Targums (generally in slavish imitation of Hebrew 'eṯ) and also in other Western Aramaic dialects, e.g. Nabataean, Palmyrene, and Galilean Aramaic; in Christian Palestinian Aramaic it occurs regularly before pronominal suffixes but not before full nouns. It is only sporadically found in the Eastern Aramaic dialects, e.g. in early Syriac (about 12 times in the Peshitta, once in the ‘Hymn of the Soul’) and in Biblical Aramaic (once— Dn 3/12). l-, used in many dialects of Aramaic as an Object Marker, also occasionally in the Hebrew of the Priestly Source (e.g. Num. 32: 15) and quite frequently in Late Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. Akkadian ana, sometimes employed as an Object Marker in the later periods of the language, viz. Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Late Babylonian, also sporadically in other periods, e.g. Middle Assyrian. In the South Semitic area may be listed Arabic 'iyyā and Gə'əz kiyya, both of which are used only with pronominal suffixes; Gə'əz lā-; the suffix particle -n in Amharic and Gafat, and the prefix particles n- in Tigrinya and nä- or yä- in Soddo.

This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

The main subject of this paper is the influence of Western science on the philosophy of the young scholar Tan Sitong (1865–98) who was active in the reform movement of the late Qing dynasty. It seeks to show that his understanding of Western science was not as confused and superficial as some commentators have claimed, and that in fact his conception of yitai drew on views of the ether and electricity which were held by some at least of the most eminent Western scientists of his time. It also demonstrates that yitai is the direct descendant of the qi of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhang Zai (1020–77), and shows how Tan developed the views of Kang Youwei (1858–1927) on the relationship of qi to consciousness.

During the first four centuries of Islamic rule Messianic hopes ran high among the peoples of the Caliphate. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, subjected to the rule of a new and alien religion, cherished and embellished their traditions of a Messiah or Saoshyant of a God-chosen line who, in God's time, would come or return to the world, end the sufferings of the faithful and the dominion of their opponents, and establish the kingdom of God upon earth. Before very long Islam itself was affected. First in the heresies of the newly-converted, dissatisfied with the status assigned to them in what was still an Arab kingdom, grafting their old beliefs on their new faith; then in the orthodoxy of all Islam, the belief arose in a MaMhdī, a “ divinely guided one ” who, in the words of the tradition, would “ fill the earth with justice and equity as it is now filled with tyranny and oppression ”.

With the passing of empires and the flowering and disappointment of successive hopes, the tradition of the Coming grew and developed. One oppressor after another added something of himself to the portraits of the Antichrist, while the many false Messiahs, in their failure, bequeathed new details and new tokens to the Messiah yet to come. Each group had its own traditions; yet they were in no way separate and water-tight, and many ideas and beliefs passed, through converts and other channels, from one religion to another.

By no means the least impatient in their expectation of Redemption were the Jews. When the crumbling of empires under the blows of internal revolutions and external invasions seemed to portend the long awaited end, anxious Jewish eyes scanned the Time of Troubles in which they lived for signs of the coming of Messiah, and sought to identify, in the events taking place about them, the vague prophecies and traditions handed down to them of the last wars of the Messiah. It was in such times that the apocalyptic books were written.

The Mamlūk empire contributed decisively to the crushing of the Copt element in Egypt. Nevertheless, the public offices and the offices of the management of the estates of the emirs, were full of Coptic scribes, who often drew upon themselves the hatred of the population, and became the scapegoats when popular passions ran high. The Jihād spirit of the closing stages of the struggle against the Crusader and the Mongols also played its part in creating agitation against the Christians. It is instructive to find that after about 1250 the tide of theological polemical literature against Christians and Christianity rose to its highest. These movements were fostered with the express purpose of whipping up popular antagonism. Speeches, pamphlets, fatwas were used to stir the people in the struggle against the Copts, and in particular those holding office.

The vague and indiscriminate use of the term Kurd goes back to early times. According to Ḥamza Iṣfahānī (circa 350/961), ed. Berlin, 151, “The Persians used to call Daylamites ‘the Kurds of Ṭabaristān’, as they used to call Arabs ‘the Kurds of Sūristān’, i.e. of 'Irāq”. Other Arab and Persian authors of the tenth century A.D. mean by Kurds any Iranian nomads of Western Persia, suth as the tent-dwellers of Fārs.

The muslim judgement against apostates has in recent years been applied in cases of publicly expressed conviction that contradict generally accepted foundations of the Muslim faith. This situation is, however, only the outcome of a theological and legal development in the 5th/11th century. Until that time, the judgement of apostasy (irtidād) could not have been applied against Muslims who voiced opinions that were regarded as unbelief. The rules for this earlier period were written down by al-Shāfi‘ī in his Kitāb al-Umm. His interpretation of the legal institution of istitāba leads to the acknowledgement that the judgement of irtidād is applicable only in a very small number of cases. This reflects legal sensitivity in the period of mass conversions when the secret practice of pre-Islamic religious rites amongst newly converted Muslims might have been widespread. Al-Shāfi‘ī's guidelines, based on earlier judgements within the Kufan tradition, gained widespread acceptance in the Hanafī, Hanbalī, and Shāfi‘ī schools of law. A first change can be noted in the middle of the 5th/11th century when authors such as al-Māwardī and Abū Ya‘lā argued for a less generous application of the istitāba. Two generations later, al-Ghazālī (d. 555/1111) and his contemporaries such as Ibn ‘Aqīl (d. 513/1119) did not restrict the judgement of irtidād to cases of openly declared apostasy. Al-Ghazālī develops a reasoning which is fully aware of the change in law and of the deviation from long-established principles. His own condemnation of three key statements of the falāsifa, expressed in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa, would be impossible without his identification of kufr with irtidād in earlier works.

The Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. possesses a collection of nearly 150 Sogdian fragments recovered from various sites in Central Asia between 1893 and 1915. During the first three decades of this century a few texts were published by F. Rosenberg and C. Salemann. Thereafter the collection was for a long time ignored, while Russian Sogdianists turned their attention to the important archive of Sogdian documents discovered in 1933 at Mt. Mugh in Tajikistan. Everyone concerned with the languages and culture of medieval Central Asia will be deeply grateful to A. N. Ragoza, whose efforts have finally resulted in the complete publication of these interesting fragments. Her edition, reviewed here, includes texts, translations, commentary, glossary, and 69 pages of facsimiles.

While Abdülhamid is usually represented as an extreme example of a ‘censorship sultan’, this article seeks to redress the balance and to present a more nuanced picture of Abdülhamid's relationship with the press. Based largely on archival material from Istanbul, the article investigates how press magnates sought to use their relationship with the palace in order to ensure their survival and to gain the concessions they wanted, and how, in turn, the sultan manipulated the press and used it to cultivate his own image and to present the empire and his sultanate in the way he wished, both to his own subjects and to other states outside the Ottoman frontier.

This paper argues that the trade in leather and other pastoralist products, which the tradition ascribes to the Meccans, could make sense on the assumption that the goods were destined for the Roman army, which is known to have required colossal quantities of leather and hides for its equipment. The hypothesis that the Meccans were servicing the Roman military is examined and found to be impossible to prove in our current state of knowledge; it is at least compatible with the evidence, however, and also highly promising in terms the light it could throw on the political aspects of the rise of Islam.

The Islamic tradition credits the promulgation of a uniform consonantal skeleton (rasm) of the Quran to the third caliph ʿUthmān (r. 644–656). However, in recent years various scholars have espoused a conjectural dating of the Quran's codification to the time of ʿAbd al-Malik, or have at least maintained that the Islamic scripture was open to significant revision up until c. 700 ce. This two-part article proposes to undertake a systematic assessment of this hypothesis. The first instalment assesses the evidence adduced in favour of a late seventh-century closure of the Quranic text, including the interest which ʿAbd al-Malik's governor al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf reportedly took in the text. It is argued that neither the epigraphic nor the literary evidence examined is incompatible with the conventional dating of the Quranic text.

In terms of number of speakers, Tibeto-Burman vies with Indo-European for the title of the world's largest language family. Yet by comparison little is known of its past. In linguistic terms, eastern Eurasia has always been much more of a terra incognita than western Eurasia. Speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages occupy a vast area in the heartland of eastern Eurasia, but Tibeto- Burman peoples are by no means the only inhabitants of the Orient. Yet at one time it was believed that virtually all languages spoken by what was impressionistically called ‘the Mongoloid race’ or ‘Mongolian races’ belonged to a vast language family known as Turanian. In the middle of the last century, Friedrich Max Müller, a celebrated champion of this theory, divided the languages of the Old World into three language families.

This article examines the relationship between the Mughal colonization of the Deccan during the twelfth/eighteenth century and the development of the Sufi traditions of Awrangabad. Concurrent with the defeat of the Deccan sultanates was a process of re-ordering the sacred Muslim landscape of the Deccan into harmony with the cultural and political values of the region's new elites by the importation of Sufi traditions from the north. As a reflection of the wider cultural make-up of the Mughal world, questions of regional, political and ethnic affiliation were articulated by writers whose own remembered homelands lay far from the Deccan. Placing Sufi commemorative texts written in Awrangabad into a wider social and literary context, the article discusses the place of the city's Sufis in the social, political and intellectual life of a short-lived imperial centre. The city's saints are in this way seen as the most semantically rich of all the cultural products of the period.

The steppe which stretches between the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, from the Delta southward as far as the foothills of the Emine Dagh, and which since the middle of the 14th century has been called, after the Bulgarian prince Dobrotitsa, the Dobruja, is the homeland of a small Turkish-speaking people, the Gagauz. It is because of their religion that they appear as a distinct group among the Turks: they are Christians belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church. In the past the Gagauz may have constituted, among the various ethnic elements of the region, a group of considerable importance, especially in the southern and middle Dobruja, from Varna and Kaliakra towards Silistria on the Danube. Besides, small isolated groups of them are to be found also in the Balkans (where they are more commonly known by the name of Sorguch): in Eastern Thrace, round Hafsa, to the south-east of Adrianople, and in Macedonia, to the east and west of Salonica, round Zikhna (near Serres) and round Karaferia (Verria). In modern times the Gagauz of the Dobruja have shrunk to a feeble minority chiefly as a result of a prolonged and massive emigration into Bessarabia. To-day even this remnant is rapidly dwindling.