The article investigates the broken pural in the Modern South Arabian language Soqotri (island of Soqotra, Gulf of Aden, Yemen). It is based on extensive field research and rich collections of lexical evidence. Primarily synchronic in its approach, the article pays attention to historical problems of Modern South Arabian and Semitic phonology and morphology whenever appropriate.

This article will discuss the dating formula in the Dadanitic inscriptions. So far, some of these have been interpreted to refer not only to the reign of the local king (mlk lḥyn), but also to another political official called rʾy. The article will discuss the merit of this interpretation based on both the questionable etymology of the term rʾy and the problematic interpretation of the terms following this word as personal names. Instead, a new interpretation of this formula as a reference to a local calendar will be explored in light of the occurrence of a similar word rʾy in Safaitic dating formula, and comparison to other ancient methods of time reckoning in the region.

The community of Shiite alchemists gathered under the pen name of Ǧābir b. Ḥayyān produced an important corpus first studied by Paul Kraus, who dated it between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. The religious, doctrinal and political issues of the corpus – especially in the last two collections – show that the Ǧābireans were a real sectarian trend unknown to heresiographers. Kraus, along with some scholars after him, understood the Ǧābirean community to be an expression of Ismaili thought. This paper aims to reconsider: a) the religious and political affiliation of Ǧābir's alchemical community in the light of textual comparisons that show a close connection between the Ǧābireans and the esoteric tenets characterizing the Shiite ġuluww as mirrored in the heresiographic sources of the late third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries, and in the Ġulāt literary sources; and b) the last collection of the Ǧābirean corpus as a polemical outcome specific to the Shiite milieu between the lesser and the greater Occultation of the twelfth Imam.

Multiple varieties of Arabic attest a definite noun + adjective syntagm in which only the adjective is marked morphologically with the article, e.g., Lebanese bēt iz-zġīr “the small house”. The feminine ending *-ah is everywhere realized -(v)t, e.g., Baghdadi sint il-māḍye “last year”. Most have assumed that it was originally appositional, and re-analysed as a construct, prompted perhaps by the loss of case (Hopkins 1984; Pat-El 2017). A few scholars (Reckendorf 1921; Retsö 2009) have argued that this syntagm was originally construct. In this article I draw on relevant Arabic data, including parallels with dialectal tanwīn, as well as comparative Semitic evidence, to argue that this syntagm is, diachronically and synchronically, one of apposition and not annexation. I propose that the feminine -at here represents a retention of proto-Arabic *-at, which was protected by the close relationship between a noun and following attribute. I conclude with a discussion of historical and comparative implications.

This article analyses a Muslim missive, which was circulated in German East Africa in 1908. Erroneously dubbed the “Mecca letter”, it called believers to repentance and sparked a religious revival, which alarmed the German administration. Their primarily political interpretation of the letter was retained in subsequent scholarship, which has overlooked two important textual resources for a better understanding of the missive: the presence of similar letters elsewhere and the fourteen copies still available in the Tanzanian National Archive. Presenting the first text-critical edition of the letter, together with a historical introduction of the extant specimens and a textual comparison to similar missives elsewhere, the article argues that the East African “Mecca letter” of 1908 was nothing more than a local circulation of a global chain letter. As such, its rapid transmission was not connected to a single political agency, but was likely prompted by a large variety of motivations.