The Iranian economy underwent impressive growth in the value and volume of foreign trade during the nineteenth century. The combined figures for imports and exports show the widening of commercial links and economic interrelations between Iran and the rest of the world, particularly Europe. Between 1800 and 1914 total visible trade at current prices rose from £2.5million to £20 million. The implication of these figures is that in real terms visible trade increased about 12 times. The greater portion of this increase occurred during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Il serait faux de considérer Le regard du roi de Camara Laye comme un manifeste anti-existentialiste. Il n'en est pas moins vrai qu'il se dégage de ceroman symbolique et mystique une attitude envers la vie et la mort qui est aux antipodes de celle adoptée par un existentialiste athée tel que Jean-Paul Sartre, par exemple. Or, Camara Laye passa neuf ans à Paris, entre 1947 et 1956, époque oé l'existentialisme fut é apogêe. Le regard du roi parut en 1954. Parmi les thêmes nombreux qui s' entrelacent inextricablement dans ce roman complex, ceux du libre-choix et du mysticisme se détachent comme les deux aspects opposês de la condition humaine. Ces deux thêmes correspondent, en gros, à la distinction que Camara Laye fait, ê tort ou ê raison, entre l'attitude ‘rationnaliste' occidentale et l'attitude surnaturelle africaine respectivement. Notre but, dans cette étude, est d'analyser Les rÔles à la fois parallêles et antagonistes, que jouent dans la vie du personnage principal, Clarence, le librechoix et le mysticisme.

Sīstān (Sijistān or Sāgistān) came within the scope of British Indian frontier defence during the Napoleonic era. Lord Minto sent out missions to the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Persia in order to acquire reliable information about the borderlands. Captain Charles Christie and Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger in 1810 explored the route westward into Persia from Baluchistan. Christie separated from the others at Nushki and travelled to Herat via Sīstān before joining Pottinger in Iṣfahān. According to Christie: Seistan is a very small province on the banks of the Helmind, comprising not more than five hundred square miles, bounded on the north and northeast by Khorasan, on the west by Persia, and on the south and south-east it is separated from Mukran by an uninhabited desert.

A passage in one of the poems of al-Kumayt describes how the poet encountered a ḏi'b (in this context undoubtedly a wolf) dying of thirst, and out of pity for the beast gave it the remnants of his own water; the first hemistich of the concluding line runs: fa Ǧubba lahŪ sawlun mina'l-mā'i ǵābirun ‘so there was poured out for him a scanty boon of water'. The second hemistich bihī kaffa 'anhu 'l-ḥībata 'l-mutaḥawwibu was interpreted by M. Ullmann in his Das Gespräch mit dem Wolf as meaning,‘ (just so much as that) wherewith a man by his ablution washes away his sin'. In my review of that work (BSOAS XLVI, l, 1983, 144) I expressed doubts about this, and proposed that the poet's meaning was the much simpler and more straightforward ‘wherewith the tormented beast relieved his anguish'.

In Frajzyngier (1981) I attempted to reconstruct vowel-raising and vowellowering rules in Chadic. Vowel-raising rules were found in three branches of Chadic, and they operated under similar conditions, viz., vowels of the stem were raised when there was a high vowel added in the suffix. Vowel-lowering rules were found in two branches of Chadic, but I could not reconstruct them as being part of Proto-Chadic because they were essentially different rules: in the East branch the vowels of the stem were lowered when a low vowel suffix was added. In the West branch the last vowel of the word was lowered when a heavy syllable preceded it. In that paper I stated that unless vowel-lowering rules were found in some other branches of Chadic, these rules could not be reconstructed as existing in Proto-Chadic. It now appears that such rules do exist in other branches. In Mulwi, or Munjuk, a Biu-Mandara language, there exists a vowel-lowering rule that operates under similar conditions as vowel-lowering rules in the East Branch l anguages, Mubi and Migama.

With few surviving chronicles and the loss of almost all the state archives, historians of the later Ṣafavid period have to rely to a disproportionate degree on the accounts of European travellers. Fortunately some of these, such as Chardin, Tavernier and Olearius, have left pre-eminent examples of the genre, but even so, few attempts have been made to explore their preceonceptions, prejudices or the extent of their understanding of Persian society. Almost all travelled for a well-defined purpose, as members of diplomatic missions, military advisers, missionaries or merchants, and their attitudes and the kind of information they recorded naturally were determined by these preoccupations. They did not necessarily ask the kind of questions that interest historians today and rarely reached levels of Persian cultural and intellectual life beyond the Court and provincial officialdom.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are outstanding chapters even in such an eventful history as that of Persia. The former witnessed the Mongol invasion and occupation; the latter ended amidst the campaigns to Timur. Although the Mongol onslaught caused much destruction, the unexpected literary outburst of the period remains a monument to the indestructible spirit of man. It is ironic that an age of terror and devastation should bring in its wake an unprecedented flowering of culture, as though the phoenix rises renewed from the ashes. For this very period produced the three greatest Persian poets, namely, Rūmī, Sa‘dī and Ḥāfiṣ, and the age in which they lived is by common consent regarded as the Golden Age of Persian poetry. In prose too, although to a lesser extent, fine work was produced, most notably of course, Sa‘dī's Gulistān.

With the accession of Tegüder, alias Ahmad, on the death of his brother Abaqa in 681/1282, the Īlkhānate was for the first time ruled by a Muslim. Consequently the possibility appeared of the establishment of peaceful relations with the rival Mamlūk sultanate under al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (regn. 678–89/1279–90). Two successive embassies were in fact sent to the sultan during Ahmad's short reign, and accounts of these as seen in Mamlūk court circles are extant in the writings of two contemporaries. The first appears in the largely unpublished biography of Qalāwūn, al-Fadl al-ma'thūr min sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by Shāf‚’ b. ‘Alī (649–730/1252–1330), and the second in the published but incomplete biography, Tashrīf al-ayyām wa'l-‘usūr fi sīrat al-Malik al-Mansūr by the maternal uncle of Shāfi'b. ‘Alī, Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Abd al-Zāhir (620–92/1223–92). Both writers served in the chancery of the sultan in Cairo.

Shī'ī scholars from Jabal 'Āmil, the hill-country which lies inland from Ṣaydā and Ṣūr in southern Lebanon, claim that theirs is the oldest of all Shī'ī communities. They attribute its foundation to Abū Dharr, a Companion of the Prophet and one of the first supporters of the claims of 'Alī to be his successor. He is said to have gone from Madīna to Damascus, and to have been exiled from there to the country districts of Bilād al-Shām, or Syria in the broader geographical sense. There is a mosque associated with his name in the village of Mays al-Jabal.