From the earliest times, the political tradition of Islam, on the one hand as formulated in Islamic theology and law, on the other hand as expressed in the accepted versions of early Islamic history, contains two distinct and in some measure even contradictory principles concerning the problems of government and obedience, of which one might be described as authoritarian and quietist, the other as radical and activist. The exponents of both these principles point to the authority of the Qur'ān and tradition, and to the example of the Prophet himself. Both principles are indeed exemplified in the career and teachings of the Prophet and in the history of the early caliphate, which constitute the shared memorv and common heritage of Muslims everywhere. These two traditions may be examined separately.

Iran was preeminently and agricultural country until recent times. Growth of oil production, exports and revenues during the course of the twentieth century led increasingly to it playing an expanded but rather geographically and economically restricted role in the structures of both employment and national income. As late as the 1960s, more than half of all Iranians in gainful employment were to be found in agriculture or related activities and most Iranians were essentially rural dwellers. Only with the advent of land reform and other upheavals in the countryside from 1961 was there a marked change in the situation. Whatever its other merits, land reform overthrew a form of equilibrium in rural areas that had previously fostered conservatism, isolation and immobility. Among the changes brought in the train of reforms enforced by the central authorities beginning in the early 1960s were displacement of population at an accelerating rate. Rural People left agricultural employment and, as soon as opportunity presented itself, moved from the villages to the towns.

One of the odder features of the Persian sources on the history of the Mongol period is the vagueness and comparative rarity of references to the ‘Great Yāsā of Chingiz khān’. This struck me with renewed force after reading Professor David Ayalon‚s articles on the Yāsā in Studia Islamica. My suspicions about the whole matter having thus been aroused, it seemed to me that it might be an interesting exercise to look again at the origin and nature of the Yāsā before trying to estimate how Mongol law worked in the Ilkhānate. And so, as I hope to show in this in this paper, it proved.

In cataloguing the British Museum's collection of early Islamic glass stamps the writer was faced with a small disk with a brief inscription, a type of which two other specimens had already been published. The weights of these pieces, which lack any explicit indication of their purpose, showed that they belonged to the category of dīnār weights. The inscription that did exist had been variously interpreted, but not as containing a personal name. For reasons that are given below, the writer came to the conclusion that the word ‘abdallāh in the legend was a name, that it could only refer to the son of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān and that the weights were produced in Egypt in ‘Abdallāh's name during the period when he was Governor there (A.H. 86–90/A.D. 705–9). ‘Abdallāh's dīnārnar weights thus became the earliest known coin weights in the great corpus of glass metrological stamps issued in Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid Egypt, preceding those of the next Governor, Qurra b. Sharīk, which had long maintained their place at the beginning of the coin weight series. The British Museum's piece could therefore be given pride of place in the catalogue as No. 1.

The great famine of 1870–71 was arguably the most tragic event in the modern economic and social history of Persia. Over wide areas of the country almost no rain fell during the winter of 1869/70, and in the following year only the western and southern provinces were blessed with any precipitation. Many areas did not have a single drop of rain during that two-year period. Khurāsān, Isfahān, Yazd and Fārs were particularly hard hit by the drought. In many areas dry-farming crops were wiped out, and harvests of irrigated crops were also very poor as a result of the severe depletion of surface and sub-surface water. Even the Zāyandeh-rūd, which normally contained a large volume of water, dried up.

A superficial consideration of the history of Arabic literature impresses one by the remarkable longevity of literary forms: a qaṣīda written by the pre-Islamic poet Imru'l-Qays and many of those written by Aḥmad Shawqī who died in 1932 are eminently recognizable members of the same species. The system of prosody as codified by Khalīl b. Ahmad (d. A.D. 791) was still very much in force, and the thematic divisions into nasīb, wasf, and madīḥ or hijā' still had much in common. Similarly the maqāma form with its or ornate rhyming prose and limited range of stock characters was still being produced in Arabic at the turn of this century, and the links with the works of al-Hamadhānī (d. A.D. 1008) and al-Harīrī (d. A.D. 1122) are plain to behold and to hear. As with much world literature which is the product of ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ societies (for want of better terms), style is all. In thematic terms there is an implicit contract of understanding between the writer and the small, rarefied, élitist public. They know what to expect and the writer or performer delivers. The language, both in its form and its content, is a vehicle through which the relationships between writer or performer, and public or audience, are expressed.

The role of metaphor in the generation of descriptive terms is a commonplace of lexicography. Agency is usually identified as analogy, and the transfer itself analysed in terms of real or imagined similarity, e.g. ‘goth’ = barbaric, ‘gypsy’ = migrant, ‘vandal’ = destructive. Strictly defined, these exemplify metonymy, a species of metaphor found particularly in toponyms and gentilics. Development of such epithets as'‘arab’, ‘deutsch’ and ‘sūdān’ may be seen as a complementary process, wherein the common attribute is given a specific referent. Thought it is no longer, since Jakobson, deemed quite proper to define metonymy as metaphor, a symbolic and often arbitrary element in the transfer might be thought to justify that interpretation, as for instance in the gentilic Iberian or the appellative Qadariyya. While ultimately of less significance than context, etymology is seldom neglected in such investigations, may, indeed, become a dominant feature, as in the perennial discussion of ḫāpirū: 'ibrī = ‘hebrew’. It is my intention in the following lines to examine the incidence and possible origins of an appellative well known from early Arabic historiography.