The acceptance by the early women converts of Islam and of Muḥammad as the Apostle of the new monotheistic religion is expressed usually by a stereotyped phrase, which takes the form of “so-and-so became resigned to God and made a bond with the Apostle of God”. At a later date a convert was merely required to repeat the shahādah, but Wensinck has shown that probably this creed was only evolved after Muḥammad's death. In the very early days the mere fact that a woman attended the prayer meetings held by Muḥammad was no doubt sufficient for her to be considered as a member of his community. This being so, what then was the significance of the bond made between the women converts and Muḥammad ? It was possibly made in order to give a more formal aspect to their conversion and to make solemn confession of their belief in one God and their allegiance to Muḥammad as his Apostle, as also to include their acceptance of his ordinances.

A Detailed analysis of single statements corroborates more and more our conviction that the elements of Hindu mentality (viz. philosophy, religion, and fine arts) are subject to certain fixed and common rules of thinking. If we acknowledge any one analytical method—of course the most general possible—as sufficient and adequate, we can presume that whatever may at any time be the object of our analysis must follow the method adopted. If we accept as a principle for the veracity of all judgments that they must be subjected to the rule of sapakṣe sattva and vipakṣe asattva, then the analysis will show that in reality all statements are measurable under the aspect of those two criteria. The only breach in this principle was made by a Jaina logical school which, while anticipating the principles of our “implication”, admits the syllogism fulfilling the anyathānupapannatva condition, i.e. it accepts as true conditional sentences of which the protasis does not reach beyond the sphere of the predicated subject (pakṣa). In other words: the argument, when predicating a fact, forms a true sentence, even if it does not predicate the class to which the fact belongs. Whilst the Buddhist syllogism oscillates between class inference and sentence calculus (sapakṣa and vipakṣa being the necessary conditions), the Jaina syllogism advances exclusively the sentence calculus, and the validity of the predication is confined merely to the implication in question.

In the cold December of 1906 I was returning from Borūjerd to Tehran. At every village on the road I inquired whether there existed any local curiosities. At Kondūrūd I was told that the inhabitants belonged to the Turkish Khalaj tribe and spoke Khalajī. I had only a couple of hours to jot down a few sentences in the dialect which struck me by its unusual features. It was too late to call back my men who, by that time, had gone ahead, and I had to content myself with the hope that some Khalaj might turn up in the capital. Indeed I had an inhabitant of “Khalajestān” brought to me from the bazaar only to discover that he spoke an Iranian dialect. I revisited Solṭanābād in 1917 in circumstances of war. At my request, the governor's men got hold of two Khalaj villagers, but the latter were so frightened that the official summons might mean some trouble in store for them that they hardly answered my questions and most pathetically asked me to let them go in peace.

The text of this tract is based on two MSS., which I call 0 (old) and M (modern). The first, written in a “Tarassul” hand of the ninth (fifteenth) century, is defective at both ends and lacks one folio between fols. 1 and 2; the second, in a modern hand, was copied from a copy made by Muḥammad Ḥusain-i Garakānī (Shams al-‘Ulamā), who claims to have transcribed it, with corrections, “from a MS. of mixed contents written in a tal‘q hand in the ninth century A.H.” This reference probabliy belongs to 0, for, after I had acquired M, I bought the origina11 fragment of five leaves among the books which had belonged to tide late Shams al-‘Ulamā. The page before fol. 1 and the one after fol. 5 of the fragment must have remained in the original collection, but what happened to the missing folio I cannot say. Instead of the titles and divisions written in the original in red ink, a more adequate system of paragraphs has been introduced into the text.

In BSOS., London, X, 1, pp. 179 ff., Mr. Bernard Lewis has published a paper: “A Jewish Source of Damascus just after the Ottoman Conquest.” On p. 181, note 4, he says. “. A Hebrew transcription of an Arabic word I have not been able to identify …. It is perhaps connected with the Arabic root kafara, to be an infidel”.

I Possess a Persian manuscript, possibly unique, on calligraphers and painters of Iran. It consists of eighty-four folios with twelve lines to a page. The manuscript is unfortunately incomplete : the introduction is missing, as well as a leaf or leaves at the end. Moreover, each of the eight miniatures which it contains has had a section cut out. The script on the reverse of these miniatures is therefore mutilated.

The medieval phase of the language now spoken between Korosko and Ḥannak on the Upper Nile is known to us since 1906, when first documents were brought to Berlin and deciphered by Professor H. Schäfer. In 1913 a full inventory of the then available material was published by the late Professor F. Ll. Griffith, in the proceedings of the Prussian Academy. It was completed by a subsequent article in 1928.

I am here presenting a series of notes on Griffith's texts, obtained mainly by a careful comparison of the medieval with the modern language. May they serve to smooth the path of some future student.

It is a common experience for the foreigner learning Tamil to discover to his dismay that after months of study with grammar and reader and munshi he is able to understand scarcely anything of the language spoken around him. In the villages and the fields, in the bazaars and on the highroads he hears a language spoken which he finds it hard to believe is the language of his study. The fact is that the language as it is spoken by the great majority of the Tamil people differs considerably from the language as spoken by the educated. And even the educated tend to reserve correctness for the written word and the speech of formal occasions, and lapse readily under more familiar circumstances into the dialect of the masses. The deviations of the dialect from standard pronunciation may be discussed under the two headings of omissions and substitutions—the dropping of a consonant or a syllable, and the substitution of one vowel or consonant for another.

One of the most noticeable features of common speech is the dropping of the final consonant. The consonants chiefly affected are m, n, ḷ, r, and l. When m and n disappear, the vowel is nasalized. Thus nām sahhiliyar becomes sakkiliyar; nān kāvaṛlcaran becomes kāvakkarã.

Writing about life in Mecca in 1884–5 Professor C. Snouck Hurgronje made this observation: ”A class of Jâwah who dwell outside the geographical boundaries but who in late years have made regular pilgrimages to Mekka are people from the Cape of Good Hope. They are derived from Malays, formerly brought to the Cape by the Dutch, with a small mixture of Dutch blood. Some words of their Malay speech have passed into the strange, clipped Dutch dialect of the Boers. On the other hand they have exchanged their mother tongue for Cape Dutch, of course retaining many Malay expressions. Taking into consideration the genuinely Dutch names of many of these Ahl Kâf (as they are called in Mekka) one is tempted to believe that degenerated Dutch have been drawn by them into their religion, and many types among them increase the probability of this suggestion. Separated from intercourse with other Moslims they would scarcely have had the moral strength to hold their religion had not eager co-religionists come to them from abroad. When and whence these came is not known to me; however this may be, the mosques in Cape Colony have been more fervently supported in the last twenty years than ever before, more trouble is taken in teaching religion and every year some of the Ahl Kâf fare on pilgrimage to the Holy City.“

[On going through the papers of Dr. Alice Werner, I found many valuable and interesting documents. Miss Mary Werner very generously presented these papers to the School, and it is the aim of the African Department to edit and publish them from time to time in the Bulletin. It is hoped that the following short article will be the forerunner of an extensive series. A. N. T.]

During some years study of the birds of Tanganyika, I have, as opportunity served, collected the names used by the local people. Most information has come from Wadigo (round Tanga), Wabondei (inland from Tanga), Wasambaa (inland again), Wazigua (south of Korogwe), Wakami (North Uluguru), and Wambwera (Mafia Island), tribes whose languages evidently have much in common.Discounting tribal variants (for example, mpanja for pasa) and leaving for future consideration a large number of names that await verification, there are about 450 different roots and descriptive names that I have felt to be sufficiently well-established to include in a list for publication (1). Allowing for the fact that differentiation of species cannot be so particular by the ordinary countryman as by the ornithologist, I have names for some species, as many as seven, for a large percentage of the birds found in a strip of country about fifty miles wide and extending from near the Kenya border south to the Rufiji Delta. A few names extend right through our area; at the other extreme, however, some species change their names within the boundaries of a tribe, three or four times, for example, in the space of eighty miles; and hence there is no doubt that a great many more names remain to be collected.

MY interest in Shāh Ismā'īl's poetry was aroused thirty-six years ago, when from my Ahl-i Ḥaqq friends I learnt that the Khāṭu'ī mentioned in one of their hymns was no lessa person than the founder of the Ṣafavi dynasty: Khatā'ī-dä nāṭiq oldï, Türkistanïn pīri oldï “(Godhead) came to speech in the person of Khatā'ī, (who) became the pīr of the Turks (of Āzarbāyjān)”, according to the explanation given to me.

For some time I suspected the Ahl-i Ḥaqq doctrines to be identical with the arcana of the Safavids, but later came to the conclusion that the home of the former was in Kurdistan, in the region of Sulaymānī, and that only by a kind of alliance were they related to the Ṣafavi propaganda.

It was only in 1920, in Paris, that I could carefully study a copy of Khatā'ī's dīvān (Bibliothéque Nationale, sup. turc 1307). This time my attention was attracted by the autobiographical hintsof the crowned poet and by the dialectic peculiarities of his Turkish poems. I read a paper on Shāh Ismā'īl's poems before the Sociètè Asiatique (9th December, 1921), and started on the preparation of a selection from Khatā'ī's dīvān. My work was several times interrupted.

During my stay in the British Protectorate of Sierra Leone in the year 1935 I had the opportunity of studying the Mende language, one of the most important languages spoken in this part of West Africa. Through the kind intermediary of the British authorities and by the friendly help of some missionaries, I was able to get knowledge of the different dialects of the Mende language, and to collect a considerable number of stories, fables, and tales.

The following two texts are specimens of the innumerable Mende stories dealing with the “Bush Demon”, a fabulous creature, who is supposed by the natives to be very powerful, and very often to behave extremely inimically towards mankind.

The language on which this short study is based is Lingala, the very interesting lingua franca spoken along the vast stretch of the central part of the main Congo River. The language is spoken almost entirely by Bantu tribes, all of whom have also their own tribal languages. Naturally there is considerable affinity between these languages, and in some senses Lingala may be said to represent the Highest Common Factor of them. Phonetically they are almost identical, and so Lingala has preserved a clearly marked phonetic system, a brief account of which should not be out of place here.