A New religion has no theology; that develops later. It is only natural that Islam should show some influence of the older religions among which it grew up. New ideas came in with converts or through talk with men of other faiths. Muslim theology moved in a circle, and came back to its starting-point with the same ideas deeper and riper. The second and third centuries of the Hijra were the formative period, after which thought degenerated into the splitting of hairs. The religious world was in a ferment which threw out many strange ideas. Sober thinkers mostly belonged to the Mu‘tazila, who taught the freedom of the human will to free God from the responsibility for sin and evil. Others found a solution of this problem in other ways, some being forerunners of al-Ash‘ari, who in 300 A.H. deserted the Mu‘tazila and used their methods to build up the system of orthodoxy. Many of these men were not Arabs, and their writings have perished; so all that is known of their teaching comes from the works of their opponents. The earliest of these is Maḳālāt al-islāmiyyīn by al-Ash‘ari; it is also the most valuable, for it is objective and free from theological hatred. The author has done his best to report what these men taught, and his education fitted him for this. Later books are not so impartial. ‘Abd al-Ḳāhir al-Baghdādi († 429) calls each deviation from the strait path an error.

The Mamlūk empire contributed decisively to the crushing of the Copt element in Egypt. Nevertheless, the public offices and the offices of the management of the estates of the emirs, were full of Coptic scribes, who often drew upon themselves the hatred of the population, and became the scapegoats when popular passions ran high. The Jihād spirit of the closing stages of the struggle against the Crusader and the Mongols also played its part in creating agitation against the Christians. It is instructive to find that after about 1250 the tide of theological polemical literature against Christians and Christianity rose to its highest. These movements were fostered with the express purpose of whipping up popular antagonism. Speeches, pamphlets, fatwas were used to stir the people in the struggle against the Copts, and in particular those holding office.

IN an article published several years ago we have collected evidence corroborating al-Maqrīzī's statement (mistrusted by Quatremère in Histoire des Mongols) that siyāsa, the legal code of the Mamlūks, was founded upon the Great Yāsa of Chingiz-Khān. The Great Yāsa was not merely a code of criminal and civil law but a system of rules governing the entire political, social, military, and economic life of the community which adopted it. The expansion of this system outside the Mongol nation was due to the belief that it was responsible for the extraordinary military success of the Mongols in the thirteenth century, and that it might be regarded as a talisman ensuring victories on the battle-field. The Yāsa rules concerning communal organization were even more important from this point of view than the laws treating of the behaviour of individuals. It is natural, therefore, to suppose that not only the Mamlūk criminal, civil, and commercial law but also the general organization of the Mamlūk state was based upon the Yāsa. The present article, inspired by the attempts made in modern times to collect and systematize the fragmentary evidence concerning the contents of the Yāsa, is intended to show that this organization is indeed comprehensible only in the light of such evidence. Some preliminary remarks are necessary.

Muhammadan Law, like many other legal systems, leaves it entirely to the parties to make their own bargain. They can fix any price they like; there is no rule demanding its fairness or adequacy. Consequently there is also no remedy against a bargain solely on the ground that the one party has suffered a loss by reason of disproportion between his own and the other party's prestations (Arts. 356, 441 Mejelle, Art. 221 O.H.).

Yet inadequacy of price is not without importance in the Laws of Sale and Hire. In its desire to protect minors, Waqfs, and the State Treasury (Bait al-Māl) from unprofitable transactions, Muhammadan Law has made inadequacy of price a ground for relief when the bargain has been made on behalf of such persons or institutions.

The following texts have been selected to illustrate the religion of Khotan and to supplement the material already available from other sources.

Cette expression se lit á la ligne 41 de la Charte de Suse et désigne l'un des deux matériaux, avec l'argent, qui ont été importés d'Égypte pour servir à la construction du palais de Darius.

Le second terme en est relativement clair. Son premier signe est très endommagé, mais on reconnaît, même sur la reproduction, de quoi justifier la lecture du P. Scheil. Celle-ci est reprise notamment par M. Benveniste, BSL., XX, iii, p. 132: dāru, équivalent de skr.

LA découverte du tokharien en Asie Centrale à la fin du siècle précédent était une grande surprise pour les indo-européenistes. Dès lors, on pouvait s'attendre à une élaboration grammaticale rapide des textes trouvés, élaboration, qui aurait indiqué en même temps la position de cette langue dans la famille i.-e.

Cependant, il n'en est rien: seulement en 1931, E. Sieg, W. Siegling, et W. Schulze publièrent leur Tocharische Grammatik, où se trouvent étudiés les fragments du dialecte A. Du dialecte B, il n'y a pas même une grammaire descriptive: tout ce que nous en possédons, c'est le recueil de quelques textes, publié par S. Lévi en 1933. D'autres manuscrits de cette branche tokh., qui se trouvent à Paris, Berlin, Tokio, restent inédits jusqu' à présent.

The most detailed account of Mani's last days is contained in the Coptic “Narrative on the Crucifixion” (Polotsky, Man. Hom., pp. 42 sqq.). As I had occasion to point out before, this “Narrative” had been quoted by the Christian Jibrā'īl b. Nūḥ in his anti-Alanichaean book which was still available to al-Bērūnī (Chronology, 20819–22).

During the brief reign of King Hormizd Mani went to Babylonia, where he stayed until the accession of Bahram I. After some time he left Babylonia and slowly travelled down the River Tigris, visiting his communities on the way. He reached Hormizd-Ardašīr (Ahwāz, Sūq al-Ahwāz), one of the four chief towns of Susiana, from where he started on a journey to the north-eastern provinces of the Sasanian empire. But he was forbidden to go there and compelled to turn back to Susiana. From Hormizd-Ardašīr he journeyed to Mesene, thence up the River Tigris in a boat to Ctesiphon. From the capital he went to “the Pargalia”, where he was joined by Bαατ. He travelled to Kholassar, and from this town he reached Belapat, where he was destined to die. The route taken by him on the journey from Kholassar to Belapat is not known, as there is a gap in the manuscript. While the situation of “the Pargalia” remains unsettled, that of Kholassar (Khalasar) is well defined by a comparison of the itinerary given by Isidorus Kharacenus with the Arab geographers (journey from Ctesiphon to Holwan):—

The words to be treated in this paper show one common aspect in their etymologies. It is suggested that they have arisen through coalescence of their etymons with the suffix na “in”—or in the case of ẖam, with the negation ma (or mi)—and that after the coalescence the final vowel was lost. The latter assumption will have to be linked up with the enclitic, or in the case of yin, at least unstressed nature of the words. In this connection we may note that the separating shad, the Tibetan comma, will invariably be found after, never before . The same holds good of , though punctuation is much rarer after . In the case of and kyin, the enclisis is moreover strongly borne out by the phonetic changes which their initial consonants undergo in assimilation to the endings of the preceding words. For the assumed treatment of the final vowel, I may refer to my paper “Certain Tibetan Suffixes and their Combinations” (in vol. v of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (HJAS.), where the same change has been suggested for the instrumental suffix.

A Detailed analysis of single statements corroborates more and more our conviction that the elements of Hindu mentality (viz. philosophy, religion, and fine arts) are subject to certain fixed and common rules of thinking. If we acknowledge any one analytical method—of course the most general possible—as sufficient and adequate, we can presume that whatever may at any time be the object of our analysis must follow the method adopted. If we accept as a principle for the veracity of all judgments that they must be subjected to the rule of sapakṣe sattva and vipakṣe asattva, then the analysis will show that in reality all statements are measurable under the aspect of those two criteria. The only breach in this principle was made by a Jaina logical school which, while anticipating the principles of our “implication”, admits the syllogism fulfilling the anyathānupapannatva condition, i.e. it accepts as true conditional sentences of which the protasis does not reach beyond the sphere of the predicated subject (pakṣa). In other words: the argument, when predicating a fact, forms a true sentence, even if it does not predicate the class to which the fact belongs. Whilst the Buddhist syllogism oscillates between class inference and sentence calculus (sapakṣa and vipakṣa being the necessary conditions), the Jaina syllogism advances exclusively the sentence calculus, and the validity of the predication is confined merely to the implication in question.

It is a common experience for the foreigner learning Tamil to discover to his dismay that after months of study with grammar and reader and munshi he is able to understand scarcely anything of the language spoken around him. In the villages and the fields, in the bazaars and on the highroads he hears a language spoken which he finds it hard to believe is the language of his study. The fact is that the language as it is spoken by the great majority of the Tamil people differs considerably from the language as spoken by the educated. And even the educated tend to reserve correctness for the written word and the speech of formal occasions, and lapse readily under more familiar circumstances into the dialect of the masses. The deviations of the dialect from standard pronunciation may be discussed under the two headings of omissions and substitutions—the dropping of a consonant or a syllable, and the substitution of one vowel or consonant for another.

One of the most noticeable features of common speech is the dropping of the final consonant. The consonants chiefly affected are m, n, ḷ, r, and l. When m and n disappear, the vowel is nasalized. Thus nām sahhiliyar becomes sakkiliyar; nān kāvaṛlcaran becomes kāvakkarã.

During some years study of the birds of Tanganyika, I have, as opportunity served, collected the names used by the local people. Most information has come from Wadigo (round Tanga), Wabondei (inland from Tanga), Wasambaa (inland again), Wazigua (south of Korogwe), Wakami (North Uluguru), and Wambwera (Mafia Island), tribes whose languages evidently have much in common.Discounting tribal variants (for example, mpanja for pasa) and leaving for future consideration a large number of names that await verification, there are about 450 different roots and descriptive names that I have felt to be sufficiently well-established to include in a list for publication (1). Allowing for the fact that differentiation of species cannot be so particular by the ordinary countryman as by the ornithologist, I have names for some species, as many as seven, for a large percentage of the birds found in a strip of country about fifty miles wide and extending from near the Kenya border south to the Rufiji Delta. A few names extend right through our area; at the other extreme, however, some species change their names within the boundaries of a tribe, three or four times, for example, in the space of eighty miles; and hence there is no doubt that a great many more names remain to be collected.

MY interest in Shāh Ismā'īl's poetry was aroused thirty-six years ago, when from my Ahl-i Ḥaqq friends I learnt that the Khāṭu'ī mentioned in one of their hymns was no lessa person than the founder of the Ṣafavi dynasty: Khatā'ī-dä nāṭiq oldï, Türkistanïn pīri oldï “(Godhead) came to speech in the person of Khatā'ī, (who) became the pīr of the Turks (of Āzarbāyjān)”, according to the explanation given to me.

For some time I suspected the Ahl-i Ḥaqq doctrines to be identical with the arcana of the Safavids, but later came to the conclusion that the home of the former was in Kurdistan, in the region of Sulaymānī, and that only by a kind of alliance were they related to the Ṣafavi propaganda.

It was only in 1920, in Paris, that I could carefully study a copy of Khatā'ī's dīvān (Bibliothéque Nationale, sup. turc 1307). This time my attention was attracted by the autobiographical hintsof the crowned poet and by the dialectic peculiarities of his Turkish poems. I read a paper on Shāh Ismā'īl's poems before the Sociètè Asiatique (9th December, 1921), and started on the preparation of a selection from Khatā'ī's dīvān. My work was several times interrupted.