Parmi la trentaine de manuscrits ou de fragments turcs en écriture ouïgoure provenant de la célèbre grotte de Touen-houang dont je prépare l'édition, il y en a deux, sans doute du Xe siècle, écrits à coup sûr par des habitants de Khotan. Il s'agit dans un cas d'une lettre à propos d'événements survenus ‘ici à Khotan’, et, dans l'autre, d'une série de notations écrites à Cha-tcheou (Touen-houang) au dos d'un rouleau de sûtra chinois par un envoyé de ‘l'État d'Or’ (altun el), expression désignant Khotan, bien attestée dans les manuscrits khotanais de Touen-houang.

May (God) bless the beginning (of the text) and favour its ending with good fortune. This is both said and written by Sīdi Sālim in praise of his Shaykh. Shaykh Mā' al-'Aynayn, may God prolong his life.

Kitāb Sulaym is possibly the earliest Shīʿī work in existence and analysis of its constituent reports could shed light on aspects of early Shīʿī thought and doctrine. This paper examines one of its reports on the subject of ikhtilāf in Prophetic ḥadīth between the Shīʿa and their opponents, and the related subjects of the status of the Companions of the Prophet and the Prophet's transmission of his knowledge to ʿAlī. It suggests dates and contexts for the composition of the report and the updating it seems to have undergone. It shows that the report reflects moderate Imāmī attitudes and doctrines similar to those attested for other leading pre-ghayba Imāmīs.

This article examines the Kashshāf, the Quran commentary of the Muʿtazilite al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144). This involves: (1) the continuous reading of the commentary on two sūras; (2) the study of al-Zamakhsharī's commentary in the Kashshāf on Quranic passages used by him or his teacher Ibn al-Malāḥimī (d. 536/1141) in their theological treatises; and (3) an analysis of a report claiming that al-Zamakhsharī had begun his commentary with the blatantly Muʿtazilite statement: “Praise be to God who created the Quran”. The conclusion is that the results of the study of the commentary on the two sūras reflect the overall theological content of the Kashshāf and that to consider the Kashshāf to be a Muʿtazilite Quran commentary amounts more to looking at the theological school of its author and to accepting medieval hearsay than it does to drawing conclusions based on a detailed examination of the relevant sources.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the general upsurge of nationalism in Europe exerted an influence on the Jewish population as well. This influence was particularly strong in Eastern Europe, where there occurred a formidable Jewish nationalistic renaissance, some features of which were: the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language; the widespread use of Jewish folk-lore in the works of Jewish writers, painters, and musicians; and the rebuilding and resettling of Palestine by small groups of Jewish pioneers. The new settlers in Palestine soon adapted Hebrew (which had indeed remained very much alive through the centuries as a literary tongue) to the requirements of daily existence, and it became the language of instruction in most of their schools. At present, practically the entire Israeli population (about two million) speaks Hebrew.

THE early history of Central Asia, the background of the Turkish expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the Mongol eruption in the thirteenth, presents a large number of problems which the slowly progressing study of documents made accessible to us in particular by the late M. Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot is bringing nearer to solution. Among these documents those from the kingdoms of Khotan and Krorayina are of outstanding importance for the early period. It seems desirable to treat of some of these problems here.

1. The vocabulary of Khotan and the Iranian words in the Krorayina documents

A large part of the vocabulary of the Khotanese language is now known, much of it already accessible in print, and it is possible to confront it with the Iranian words found in Krorayina. It is at once noticeable that in the two vocabularies, while part is identical, as in lāstana- ‘quarrel’, corresponding to Krorayina lastana, or prahona- ‘garment’ to Krorayina prahuni, yet marked differences appear which are unlikely to be due only to difference of time.

I would notice here the following ten cases.

1. In an article Recent Work in ‘Tokharian’ (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1947, 149–150), I called attention to the difference between Krorayina guśura, Kuchean Sanskrit gauśura, and the Khotan *bisīviraa-, attested in the plural bīsīvīrā of high birth ‘(Suvarnabhāsa-sūtra, Khotanese Texts I p. 248, 73 r 1), and the related bäsīvärāssai, translating Sanskrit kulaputra, a person of good family. The treatment of the initial υ- shows that here two dialects are concerned.

This essay analyses the sole extant chapter of a fourth/tenth-century Faḍā'il al-Ṣaḥaba work by the ḥadı̄th critic and scholar Al-Ḥasan ʿAlı̄ ibn ʿUmar ibn Aḥmad Ibn Mahdı̄ ibn Masʿūd al-Dāraquṭnı̄ (d. 385/995). As scholars have noted, faḍā’il literature beyond the chapters on religious merits of the Companions in the Ṣaḥı̄ḥayn is among a number of sub-genres of tradition-based literature (alongside, for example, targhı̄b wa tarhı̄b), which tends largely to be comprised of weak, non-canonical ḥadı̄th. This has generally been interpreted as evidence of the acceptability of “lower standards” for the inclusion of ḥadı̄th in exhortatory or edifying literature (lower when compared to standards for the authentication of ḥadı̄th in relation to law). This conceptualization both centres law as the dominant lens through which to view the reception of ḥadı̄th in general, and contributes to the marginalization of faḍā’il literature as merely folkloric. Using a history of emotions perspective to elucidate the nature and mechanisms of edification and pious instruction in faḍā’il texts, this essay argues that far from being marginal, faḍā’il works were central to the formation of emotional communities and to the construction of pious subjects in the Būyid period. Al-Dāraquṭnı̄'s fragmentary text reflects how a well-known and highly respected fourth-century ḥadı̄th scholar capitalized on the emotional resonances and sectarian ambiguities made available by the abundance of non-legal and non-prophetic ḥadı̄th generated during the second and third centuries ah.

In 1802 Kino, a middle-aged Japanese peasant woman in a remote country place, declared that God, having many times tried unsuccessfully to manifest himself in saints and prophets, had “this time” (kono tabi) managed at last to find in her a vehicle for the delivery of his full and final message. From 1802 till 1826 (the year of her death God, through his intermediary Kompira, who plays the part that the archangel Gabriel plays in the Koran), inspired this illiterate peasant with a continuous flow of communications, which from 1811 onwards were taken down in writing and are preserved in some 300 rolls. On the strength of this revelation she founded a sect that despite prosecution in the nineteenth century to-day numbers about 40,000 followers, and which, though its ways of life owe something to Buddhist monasticism, can only be described as a separate religion.

Tocharian B eñcuwo “iron” and Tocharian A añcu* have been connected to the Iranian words for “iron”, notably Khwarezmian hnčw. On the basis of insights into the patterns of borrowings from Khotanese into Tocharian, it is argued that the Tocharian words must have been borrowed from a preform of Khotanese hīśśana- “iron”. Further, a new etymology is proposed for “iron” that accounts for the variation of this word in Iranian. The fact that Tocharian borrowed the word for “iron” from Khotanese, not from the archaic steppe dialect of Iranian that is the source of many other loanwords in Tocharian, suggests that the contacts between this latter dialect and Tocharian took place before iron became widespread in the region.

This paper introduces the exchange of letters in early Sufism, analyses the significance of these exchanges, and examines these documents not for their general literary qualities or for theoretical discussion of appropriate conduct but, rather, for actual data relating to personal and interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the crucial need for creating a corpus of Sufi letters and pieces of correspondence. The discussion is divided into methodological and conceptual-historical perspectives. The methodological perspective includes a survey of sources, the question of transmission, letter fragment usage by later authors, and a reconstruction attempt of the actual circumstances of these documents. The conceptual-historical perspective analyses content, rhetoric, argumentation forms, and self-representation.