For almost a decade I have taught the ‘Constitution of Medina’ at Cambridge as the eight distinct documents it comprises, issued on various occasions over the first seven years or so, of Muḥammad's Medinan period, using a typescript text of these documents, designated A to H. My attention was first attracted to it when reviewing the late Professor A. Guillaume's translation of the Sīrah of Ibn Isḥāq/Ibn Hishām, because of the astonishingly close parallels with ḥawṭah treaties from Ḥaḍramawt upon which I was working about that time. Originally I had intended to publish a typical ḥawṭah agreement together with an analysis of the ‘Constitution’ which of course is not really a constitution at all. I still intend to publish my ḥawṭah corpus and demonstrate the similarity, but it has long been time to publish the analysis and identification of the separate documents contained in the ‘Constitution’, more particularly as it has important methodological and historical implications if anything approaching a definitive modern account of Muhammad's career is to be written.

Phonological distinctions vanish in the course of the evolution of a language, but in diachronic phonology it is known that the distinctive oppositions involved do not necessarily disappear as a consequence thereof. Certain effects brought about by the ancient phonemes while they were still articulatorily different do survive after the originally distinct articulations have merged into one. The surviving effects are customarily called ‘reflexes’, that is, of the phonemes now extinct, and it is they that permit us to assume with a considerable degree of certainty that the distinctions now perceivable by virtue of the surviving effects were once vested in different phonemes in the same language. The doctrine of phoneme reflexes has contributed immensely to an ampler, more complete, and more refined knowledge of the sound system of the ancient Indo-European languages. In Semitics, however, this line of investigation has hitherto been much less exploited. While there can be no doubt that we have a fairly good knowledge of what might be termed ‘the common Semitic sound system’, such insights can only tell us what phonological distinctions exist in one historical Semitic language, while being absent from another, and how correspondences should be drawn up between them. The advantage, however, of the study of reflexes is that it affords insights into the mechanism of one and the same language and permits inferences on historically unattested distinctions as well as the reconstruction of a stage of a language prior to its earliest written documentation. We can grasp here the real difference between comparison and reconstruction: while comparison enlightens us as to how languages differ, it cannot make us see the true identity or physiognomy of any given language. This latter task is dependent upon the doctrine of reflexes. If certain otherwise common Semitic distinctions involving pharyngals are reflected in Early Akkadian as neatly regulated mechanisms of vocalic patterns, we must infer that it is not true to say that Akkadian is set apart from other Semitic languages by the absence in it of pharyngal articulations, because these articulations, since they left traces, could not have been absent in that language in its earliest stages. The identity of Akkadian will, therefore, have to be established on the ground of the presence, rather than the absence, of a certain statable number of pharynsal phonemes.

The final expulsion of Moriscos from Spain in 1609 brought a new wave of Spanish Muslims to Tunis to join that substantial community of their fellow-countrymen which had increased steadily in number from the fall of Naṣid Granada onwards. Among these refugees and immigrants were some with considerable technical expertise: architects, military men, and skilled craftsmen whose arrival on Muslim territory caused a minor technological renaissance.

The peculiarity of the Druze law of divorce does not lie in the mechanism of dissolution, which is not materially different from that of the Muslim sharī'a, but in its effects: a dissolved marriage cannot be restored; the repudiation of the wife by itself creates an absolute bar to a remarriage between the parties. Article 11 of the Lebanese Druze Law of Personal Status of 1948 (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Lebanese Druze Law’), which was adopted by the Israeli Druze Community in 1961, provides, in conformity with Druze religious law, that a man must not remarry his divorced wife. Unlike Islamic law, Druze law does not distinguish between revocable (raj'ī) divorce, which does not immediately sever the marital bond but permits reinstating the wife during the waiting-period ('idda) by express utterance or significant conduct, and irrevocable (bā'in) divorce, which takes immediate effect; reinstatement in the latter case requires the conclusion of a new marriage with all that this implies (dower, etc.). A Druze divorce is absolute under any circumstances; the wife cannot be reinstated by way of taḥlīl, i.e. an intermediate marriage to another man and divorce from him so as to become again permitted to her first husband; this course is adopted in Islamic law after the third repudiation. Although the Lebanese Druze Law does not say so expressly, it seems that the legislator intended to block the reinstatement of the wife and restoration of the marriage by every possible means. In fact, religious law goes so far as to forbid divorced spouses to meet under the same roof even if separated by many partitions. The ban on taking back a divorced wife dates from the early days of the Druze religion.

The aim of this paper is to elucidate some of the phrases and slogans which occur in the Muslim traditions about the Fitna, the first ‘civil war’ in Islam, which, according to tradition, begins with the murder of the caliph ‘Uthmān in 36/656 and ends with the recognition of Mu'āwiya as caliph in 41/661. These phrases and slogans are discussed in the light of ideas and terminology found in Judaism, and it is suggested that a better understanding of them can be gained by the comparison with Judaism than by the attempts to interpret them in more traditionally Muslim terms. It is argued that both the lā ḥukma slogan and the ḥudūd references indicate a dispute within the early Muslim community about the authority to be accorded to Scripture, and that the terminology used is so reminiscent of that used in Judaism that it is likely that the dispute was the same as that which we know was the mam one between Jewish sects in the early Islamic period—the relative status of Scripture and Oral Law. This would be an issue which has not previously been mentioned in discussions of the issues involved in the Fitna and, if the suggestions made here prove to be acceptable, it would provide more material for discussion of the sectarian circles which contributed to the development of Islam.

If our present knowledge of the history of the Muslim Maghrib is in general unsatisfactory, few periods remain as obscure as the fifteenth century.

The extant sources are very scarce. Contemporary Maghribī historical writings are practically non-existent and, with few exceptions, this is still an epoch for which Christian chronicles are not yet really relevant. Only fragmentary and partial information can be extracted from the contemporary Spanish and Portuguese documents. Therefore, we have to rely for our knowledge on the so-called manāqib literature or hagiographic dictionaries which proliferated in Morocco during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These volumes—many of which were lithographed in Fās during the nineteenth century—cannot be considered a first-rate source. They are posterior to the period dealt with and appear as versions of a traditional history composed over the years by agglomeration, repetition, and revision from a series of original stories which may be doubtful, even though they are hallowed by time and usage, and fortified by the weight of respectability. Committed to writing, they have acquired the seal of authority and have seldom been challenged.

With the affluence brought by oil, the cities, towns, and villages of Saudi Arabia are being transformed as they are rebuilt; the older mosques are being replaced by new ones in concrete and built in styles unknown in Najd 30 years ago. As a result, structures built in accordance with traditional designs are being gradually obliterated by modern, alien buildings. This process has virtually wiped out the older mosques on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia and those in Najd may well vanish in the course of the next few years. This article attempts, albeit very incompletely, to catalogue some of the traditional mosques of Najd and to describe their architectural characteristics. I shall deal with these buildings within their geographical areas beginning with al-Ḥawṭca in southern central Najd and moving northwards, towards al-Qaṣīm and Sudayr.

Stimulated by Z. Harris's ‘Discourse analysis’ which raised the problem of continuing linguistic analysis in a particular connected discourse beyond the limits of a single sentence and by K. L. Pike's hints at the existence of a formal and semantic supra-sentence unit, such as the paragraph, American linguists produced some systematic and coherent descriptions of larger stretches of discourse, pointing towards certain grammatical, lexical, and stylistic relations reaching across sentence boundaries. Although most of these works deal with Amerindian languages, the method of analysis and the terminology they use can readily be applied to other languages, as was done, for instance in English, by V. Waterhouse in ‘Independent and dependent sentences’. This author draws a parallel between independent and dependent morphemes, phrases, and clauses on the one hand, and independent and dependent sentences, on the other, pointing out that ‘not all sentences are independent’ and that ‘there are in fact grammatical constructions which indicate that some sentences are dependent and therefore to be included in some larger linguistic form such as paragraph or discourse’.

Publications by Weinreich, Chafe, Makkai, and Mitchell have put the problem of idiom formation in the focus of attention. Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) idioms, however, seem to have received very little attention or no serious attention from professional linguists. The majority of KA idioms are semantically specialized phrases that belong to a more informal or colloquial level of speech.

The Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities of the British Museum has in its collections an inscribed plaque (BM 136772) which is intriguing for bearing not one but one and a half inscriptions, for being almost perfectly legible, and yet for having no obvious purpose. There is no information about its provenance (the plaque was in a European private collection for some considerable time) other than that it is said to have come, indirectly, from Iran. Of this there can be little doubt, as we shall see. The plaque is of sheet silver, roughly rectangular, and measures approximately 13 · 5 cm. in width and 14 · 5 cm. in length. At some time it has been folded in half both ways, leaving a horizontal crack across the middle. Another crack runs across the bottom right-hand corner. It is possible to give these orientations because of the 21 lines of writing which, from their division, were incised in the plate after it acquired its present shape. The writing is ‘inscriptional’ Parthian. The first 14 lines bear a close copy of the corresponding version of the rock inscription of Shapur I at Ḥāǰīābād (by Persepolis), and 11. 15–21, probably by another hand, contain a repetition of the beginning of this. But this is by no means to say all.

One of the chief fascinations exercised by words—especially by loan-words—derives from their dual function as markers of both linguistic and cultural change. For those interested in words from this historical view-point perhaps nothing is more tantalizing than the difficulty of reproducing, in the study of words as cultural markers, those types of clear and comprehensive classification which have been so successfully developed for the analysis of words in their formal aspects.

Emperor Menelik's reign (1889–1913) opens a new era in the kind of sources that the historian has at his disposal for the analysis of modern Ethiopian history. During his reign printing presses were set up in the country and spurred a gradual growth in the more widespread use of Amharic, not just as the spoken but also the written language of the imperial court. This is not to say that the Gә'әz literary tradition in Ethiopia disappeared altogether, for some chronicles in Gә'әz continued to be written after 1935, often very similar in form and content to those which have survived for the Gondarine and earlier periods of Ethiopian history. However, Menelik's reign, and the official chronicle of it by Gäbrä Sәllase, mark a significant departure, not least because the chronicle was written in Amharic and not in Gә'әz. There are a few earlier published literary works in Amharic, the songs of the kings of the fourteenth century being the most significant, but it should be emphasized that the Gә'әz tradition continued parallel to the Amharic in the form of tarikä nägäst, i.e the history of kings. Some of these are now preserved at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa, like the Gondarine tarikä nägäst which belonged to Nәgus Wäldä Giyorgis, the valuable biography of the grandson of Emperor Tewodros (1855–68), Mäšäša, and a published biography of Ras Makonnen.

Puppetry in China has a long history. The modern remnants of a rich tradition testify to the wealth that was, and the art is being revived in various ways, and given new forms. Although there is more early literature and specific comment in ancient books on ancient Chinese puppets than there is for any other kind of puppetry in its early days, it is not absolutely clear when they originated. The words nearly always used to refer to puppets are mu-ou-hsi ‘wooden doll plays’ and k'uei-lei-tzu, k'u-lei-tzu, k'uei-lei, or k'uei-lei-hsi. The original meaning of the latter terms is tantalizingly elusive, but the k'u might possibly suggest a hole or aperture within which they were performed. These are historically the most common words used. The earliest mention of any of the terms is found in Feng-su t'ung by Ying Shao (fl. c.a.d. 178), but the origins of puppetry may either lie much before or after that book.

In two previous studies we have sought to advance the process of understanding the complex linguistic character of the Āḍi Granth (AG) by isolating and describing two special stylistic varieties of language, which significantly differ from the normal idiom of the book as a whole. These were shown to be based respectively on the extensive use of elements drawn from the dialects of the South-Western Panjab, and of loan-items from Persian: but it was further emphasized that they were stylistic varieties of the usual AG poetic language, and were in no sense to be regarded as straightforward examples of contemporary Multani or Indo-Persian.

1.l. From May 1974 to May 1976 I carried out field research in the Nilgiri Hills, South India, with the purpose of collecting materials on the languages, oral traditions, religious beliefs and practices, and customs of three tribal communities, the Ālu Kuṟumbas, the Pālu Kuṟumbas, and the Muḍugas.

In this paper I shall present some first specimens of the language and folklore of the hitherto nearly unknown Pālu Kuṟumba tribe.

Awngi is a central Cushitic language, the southernmost representative of the Agaw group. It is spoken in the Provinces of Agawmǝdǝr and Mätäkkäl, Governorate General of Gojjam, Ethiopia, by at least 50,000 persons. This dialect group has been called by Conti Rossini ‘Awiya’. This is a misnomer; the word awíya means ‘Agaw man’ (literally: ‘son of Agaw’, see §3.4). The language itself is called by its speakers awῃi, with the derivative -ῃi (Amharic -iñña) used for languages. In my earlier publications, I simply called it Southern Agaw, but following the preference of several of my colleagues, I adopted the self-denomination ‘Awngi’.

Throughout most of pre-Han literature we find a particle hu which appears to occupy the same syntactic position as the directive preposition yü. Indeed, one particle often substitutes for the other in parallel passages.

‘The old and the weak are rolled into the gutters’ (of the dead in time of famine; the parallel in Me. 2B/4 has yü for hu).

Saint worship is a form of religious expression common to most Islamic societies, but it is especially important in the religious life of the Māppiḷas, the Muslims of Kerala State, South India. The Māppiḷas' largest public festivals are a variant of saint worship known as nerccas. These are expensive and elaborate ceremonials which combine nominally Islamic elements with certain features of indigenous folk festivals. Thus, while the focal point of each nercca is the reverence shown to a pīr, shaykh, or shahīd, all the festivals are conducted within a ritual framework derived from the worship of folk deities in Kerala. The nerccas are important just because of this hybrid character; that is, they provide examples of an especially complex variety of Islamic saint and martyr worship. However, the festivals are equally important when they are viewed solely as a source of information about Kerala Muslims, for the Māppiḷas possess only the most fragmentary records concerning their own past and the nerccas offer one of the most important means by which it is possible to study the history and religious culture of this important Muslim community.

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.

It is an inherent feature of the adjectives ‘many’ (‘much’) and ‘few’ that they qualify nominal concepts implying ‘plurality’ so that the individuality of the units of which the entities underlying the specific nominal concepts are composed is clearly conspicuous: ‘Many (or: few) men (or: people)’, designating the plurality of the concept ‘man’; ‘much money’, designating the plurality of the concept' coin' (or: ‘bank-note’); ‘a (great) many clergy’, designating the plurality of the concept ‘clergyman’; etc. Such a semantic type, in which the epithets ‘many (much)’, ‘few’ are used, exists beside a semantic type of a related sense, as exemplified by the following instances: ‘a large mass (or: number, or: group) (of men, people, soldiers, etc.)’; ‘a small amount (of money)’; etc.