In September 1964 we were able, after considerable difficulty, to reach the village al-Jinainah (al-Junainah) of Wādī Jirdān (which we had already visited earlier in the year along the spectacular new road from Wādī ‘Amaqīn). In the afternoon of that day and early next morning before leaving to return to ‘Ataq we made a brief survey of the tower known as al-Muqaiyad—the subject of this article. The visit being so hurried and part of the work being carried out after dark, we were not able to record everything in quite the detail we should have wished. We are much indebted to Lt.-Col. Adrian Donaldson, D.S.O., M.B.E., the CO., and Major S. F. B. Francis, T.D., then of the 5th Battalion, Federal Regular Army, the latter escorting us to the mouth of Wādī Jirdān at ‘Ayādh, and for the generous hospitality they gave us at ‘Ataq. We acknowledge with pleasure the courtesy of Shaikh Ruwais b. Miḥsin b. Ḥasan Namārī Hilālī, Federal Councillor, who permitted us to survey the ḥuṣn and supplied us with much information on it, as also to his brother Ḥasan b. Miḥsin.

Several biographical notices on the seventeenth-century Egyptian chronicler Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Bakrī al-Ṣiddīqī al-Miṣrī al-Shāfi’ī al-Wārthī al-Ash’arī sibṭ Abi ‘l-Ḥasan, better known as Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr, have been written in more than one language, but most of them contain misleading, and sometimes erroneous, statements about his birth and death dates and works. The new edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, for instance, in its brief notice ‘al-Bakrī, b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’, states that this is the ‘name of two Arab historians of the notable family of Egyptian shaykhs of the Bakriyya ṭarīḳa’, viz. (1) Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Ṣiddīḳī al-Miṣrī, d. 1028/1619; (2) Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Abi ‘l-Surūr Shams al-Dīn Abū ‘Abdallāh, son of the above, b. c. 1005/1596, d. c. 1060/1650. While the entry ‘ al-Bakrī b. Abi ‘l-Surūr’ really refers to the first, it does not, as such, apply to the alleged second historian whose identity, supposed works, and relationship to the first have to be established. The notice, moreover, gives wrong dates and erroneously ascribes some of the works of Ibn Abi ‘l-Surūr to his supposed son.

A powerful revivalist impulse emerged in the Islamic world of the eighteenth century. Some of the leaders, like Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb or Shāh Walī Allāh in India, are well known. However, the foundations of this revivalism remain relatively obscure and personalities who inspired its leaders remain shadowy figures in history. One such person is Muḥammad Ḥayyā al-Sindī, who was a teacher of the founder of the Wahhābī movement. A closer examination of this Medinese scholar and the intellectual community of which he was a part can provide insight into the conditions which helped to inspire a prominent revivalist. Even more important, however, such analysis provides a basis for discerning some of the relationships among a number of the major eighteenth-century movements.

Au cours de l'été 1972, nous avons trouvé aux archives de Topkapl Sarayl, sous la cote E 8938, un firman addressé au qāḍī de Kilia et délivré à Constantinople le 14 Safer 914/14 juin 1508.

In BSOAS, XXXIV, 3,1971, 546 I suggested the possibility that the development of Indo-European o to ā in Sanskrit, which, according to Brugmann's well-known and much contested theory, had been held to take place only in open syllables, may in fact have taken place in other environments also,. namely before consonant groups. The proposal was made in view of certain word equations quoted in connexion with the development of spontaneous cerebrals in Sanskrit, notably between Skt. κāṇḍα- ‘section between two joints, phalanx’ and bhāṇḍα-’ furniture, utensils, movable property’ on the one hand, and Gk.

Achinese and the Austronesian languages spoken on the South-East Asian mainland (‘Chamic’) are known to have borrowed numerous words from Mon-Khmer and to show other effects of Mon-Khmer contact. Systematic comparison especially of their historico-phonological peculiarities makes it appear that they are closely related, irrespective of this, within Austronesian. Such a postulated relationship is at variance with the findings of lexicostatistics. It is suggested that the discrepancy results from the very high incidence of Malay loans in Achinese.

The conversion of the Znāga of the western Sahara 1 to Islam may have begun as early as the second/eighth century, but the spread of Arabic as a spoken language in the area began only with the immigration of Arabic-speaking tribes 2 in the eighth/fourteenth century, and the development of many of the conventional Arab and Muslim perspectives which now exist among most tribes of Znāga origin seems to have taken place only during the last two or three centuries.

The Syriac document recently published by I. Shahîd in The martyrs of Najrân: new documents (Bruxelles, 1971) opens with the following passage:

This volume of Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic fragments was acquired from M. Shapira in July 1882 along with many Karaite MSS, but unlike them has not been catalogued. From the ‘Descriptive list of acquisitions’ (in MS) at the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, it may be gathered that MSS Or. 2581–2 constituted, when acquired, two volumes, while at a later date 2581 had been divided into two volumes (A and B, described in Margoliouth's Catalogue Nos. 329–30), which fact apparently caused Or. 2582 to be overlooked. However, 10 folios of the MS had already been described by S. Poznański (Festschrift Steinschneider, Leipzig, 1896, 207–8) as being part of maqāla iv of al-Qirqisāni's al-Anwār. This identification was subsequently copied by M. Steinschneider, Die arabische Literatur der Juden, Frankfurt a. M., 1902, 79, and also in the index to Margoliouth's Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan MSS in the BM.

It has long been recognized that the letters n and z, whose initial and medial forms had already fallen together by the date of the ‘Ancient letters’, remained distinct in final position, -n being provided with a long horizontal or vertical tail. At a slightly later period in the history of the Sogdian script two more pairs of letters—still distinguished in all positions in the ‘Ancient letters’— fell together: ‘ain with r,1 and x (ḥīth) with γ (gimel). The rare letter ‘ain does not occur in final position; but both x and γ are comparatively common in all positions. It is therefore remarkable that it should never have been noticed that final x and y are regularly distinguished in exactly the same way as -n and -z. The distinction is clearest in the Buddhist manuscripts,2 in which final x has a long horizontal or vertical tail: — (= ‘horizontal -x’) or L (= ‘vertical -x’), while final γ has only a rudimentary tail pointing down-wards. There is some variation in the distribution of the two forms of -x. In some manuscripts, e.g. Vim. and P 2, both are used interchangeably. In most ‘horizontal -x’ is preferred: it is the only form found in VJ, SCE, Dhu., P 5, and P 6, while in Dhy. and P 3 ‘vertical -x’ is also occasionally employed

Although a substantial amount of information is available about Sheikh Hussein of Bale,1 even an approximate dating of his life has so far presented considerable difficulties. An important clue is provided by the genealogy of Sayyid Mahdi [′mæhdi] 2 of Merca in Anonymous 1927, discussed in Ceriilli, 1938, 20–1.3 This genealogy gives 25 intermediate ancestors between Sheikh Hussein and Sayyid Mahdi, but does not indicate when the latter lived.