Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Among the uncertain Arabic coins in the British Museum are two dirhams of the years 361 and 363 a.h., which are described by Professor Stanley Lane-Poole (J.R.A.S., 1876, p. 295) as bearing the name of the Caliph al-Muṭī'lillah and of the sovereign (?) The mint place on one of the coins is illegible; that on the coin of 361 a.h. was identified by Dr. O. Codrington as “Rūbār,” and his collection contains a similar but more perfect specimen ; there is also one at Paris, in the Cabinet des Médailles, struck at Rūbār ; and one was published by Tornberg in the Rev. Num. Belge, 5th series, ii, 243. He read the mint Rūbār, and the name of usru āh's ancestor as adding that there was a dinar of the same type and mint in the collection of Baron Chaudoir, and that Millies possessed a dirham which he surmised to belong to the Dailamite dynasty of Wahsūdān.
page 474 note 1 Some of the coins of the Marwanid dynasty published by Tornberg (Num. Cuf. R. N. Holm., class xix) seem to admit of emendation. No. 8, struck at Baṣra in 397 a.h., is attributed to Mumahhid al-Daula Abu-l-Ḥasan, whereas he was Abu Manṣūr. It may be that the name should be read , who was Abu-l-Ḥasan ('Ali b. Naṣr) and ruled circû 376–409 a.h. over the Batīḥa, the swampy district between Wāsiṭ and Baṣra, which latter place was an unlikely Marwanid mint. He had succeeded his uncle, the Ḥājib Muzaffar b. ‘Ali, who had ousted the issue of ‘Imrān b. āhīn, the outlaw who had asserted his independence against Mu'izz al-Daula, and it was at his court that al-Qādir had found a refuge against his predecessor, al-Ṭā'i. The second name on the coin, the Amīr Rukn al-Daula b. Dā'ūd (?), I cannot recognize. A coin very similar to the above is, I think, contained in the Paris Cabinet des Médailles, and two have been published by S. Lane-Poole in the “Fasti Arabici,” vi and vii (Num. Chron., 1887, p. 337, and 1892, p. 165). The mint of the former, read Ṣinnabra(?), may well be Baṣra, as is that of the latter, which also bears a second name, the Amīr “Baṭār al-Daula Abu Kida,” unexplained.
Again, No. 11, which is read , would seem to belong to the first Oqailid ruler of Mosul, and to read . He was still ruling in 381 a.h., the date of the accession of the Caliph al-Qādir, whose name appears thereon. No coin of this ruler seems to be elsewhere recorded.
And No. 12, struck at Naṣībīn, bears the name of the Caliph al-Muṭī' ; it must therefore be prior to 363 a.h., and anterior to the Marwanid dynasty. The name should perhaps be read , and the coin thus belong to the Hamdanid dynasty. A very similar coin of Abu Talib is described, B.M. Or. iii, No. 18 ; and the next, No. 19, was struck at Naṣībīn.
page 476 note 1 The Munich MS. Arab. 378c was obligingly sent by Dr. Leidinger, head of the Munich MSS. Department, to the India Office Library for my use. Each year's narrative comprises political occurrences and a necrology. The author says under the year 434 a.h. (fol. 135b) that down to this date he had perused and made extracts from the history of Hilāl b. al-Muḥassin al-Ṣābi from the copy in the Waqf of the late Malik al-Araf (reigned, at Damascus, 626–635 a.h.), but that it failed him from this point, and down to the year 449 a.h., inasmuch as ars al-Ni'ma, his son, had recorded under 448 a.h. that his father's history extended to that date.
[The Waqf in question seems to be that described in a previous passage in the MS. (fol. 66b), where, after recording a death in 417 a.h., the author says that a son of the deceased possessed a shoe said to have belonged to the Prophet, which passed into the possession of the late sovereign al-Araf Mūsa b. Abu Bakr b. Ayyūb, who bought a house in Damascus, constituted it a Waqf, placed the shoe therein, and conveyed there a number of books, on which he settled an endowment.]
He says also in the notice of the arīf al-Raḑī (fol. 28a) that he had been told an anecdote relating to him by the vizier of the Caliph al-Musta'ṣim at Bagdād in 644 a.h. [The anecdote is told by Ibn allikan, in his life of al-Raḍī (De SI. Eng., iii, 120), as derived from a certain compilation.] And in the notice of the arīf al-Murtaḍā (fol. 138a), after mentioning some strange tenets he held, and his reflections on the orthodoxy of the Ṣaḥāba, he proceeds:
The ‘grandfather’ must be Ibn al-Jauzi, for Ḥāji alīfa says (iii, 287, No. 5484) that Ibn al-Jauzi had given mischievous extracts of this character from the arīf's writings. The Munich MS. is thus the work of the Sibṭ Ibn al-Jauzi, and a part of his “Mirāt al-Zamān.” It is, however, to be noticed that two quotations, at least, of the “Muntaẓim” of Ibn al-Jauzi which occur in the B.M. MS. of the Mirāt al-Zamān—Or. 4,619—are not to be found in the corresponding passages in the Munich MS., whilst the “Kitāb al-Mauḍū'āt” (Brockelmann, i, 503, No. 26) is mentioned therein on fol. 60b as the work, merely, of “the ai Ibn al-Jauzi,” and not of “my grandfather.” The Munich MS. is far fuller than B.M. Or. 4,619; it must, therefore, be a later recension of the work.
page 478 note 1 See ahrastāni, ed. Cureton, i, 192–3.
page 478 note 2 Maḥmūd held firmly to his attitude as upholder of orthodoxy and of its Caliph (Yamīnī, Delhi ed., pp. 383–9). In 408 a.h. he imitated, exceeded rather, the Caliph's efforts to discourage heresy. See Ibn al-Aīr, ix, 216, and, more fully, Munich MS., fol. 35b:—
(Ibn al-Aīr has )
For the “Jahmiyya” sect, see ahrastāni, i, 60–1.
page 481 note 1 In connection with the words . Professor D. S. Margoliouth refers me to the passage in Harīri Maqāmāt iii (de Sacy, 2nd ed., i, 37)—
and the gloss thereon (ib. ii, 83) by al-Rāzi, i.e. ams al-Dīn Abu Bakr
Muḥammad b. Abi Bakr (Ḥāji alīfa, No. 733); see ib. i, Introd., p. vii—