This short article deals with the emigration of ՙUtba b. Abī Waqqāṣ (or ՙUtba b. Mālik), a member of the Quraysh subdivision named Banū Zuhra, from Mecca to Medina, which occurred several years before the Hijra of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions. ՙUtba's famous brother, Saՙd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, belonged to the inner circle of Companions surrounding the Prophet Muḥammad from early on in his career. ՙUtba, by contrast, fought against the Prophet at Uՙud and probably died a pagan.

The Saṅghāṭasūtra (Sgh) is one of the most extensively preserved Old Khotanese texts, together with the Book of Zambasta (Z) and the Suvarṇabhāsasūtra (Suv).1 Unlike Z which is known chiefly from one manuscript and only a few fragmentary variants from other manuscripts, the Sgh is represented by a large number of fragments belonging to several manuscripts. We now have Giotto Canevascini to thank for the publication of virtually all the extant manuscript material belonging to the Khotanese Sgh, originally the author's doctoral dissertation prepared under the supervision of R. E. Emmerick and submitted in 1992 at the University of Hamburg.2 It constitutes a major contribution to Khotanese research and to Iranian and Buddhist studies as well: it is of note, for instance, that Canevascini could demonstrate that the oldest manuscript of Sgh already contains textual corruptions revealing that it is actually a copy from a still older manuscript (p. xv), and that his chronological arrangement of the manuscripts provides definitive evidence that the spellings g, ś and ṣ precede, in Old Khotanese, the spellings gg, śś and ṣṣ (pp. xv–xvi) as suggested by E. Leumann, Buddhistische Literatur, nordarisch und deutsch, I. Teil, Nebenstücke (Leipzig, 1920), 92 (cf. Ṡgs., xix).

Shuhayd (or Shahīd) al-Balkhī is remembered mainly as one of the earliest poets in Neo-Persian. But he was also a minor poet in Arabic and, moreover, a tantalizingly obscure figure in the history of Muslim philosophy in the ninth century. A first sifting of the relevant biographical material was made by M. Qazwīnī in 1910 and the only really significant contributions since have come from P. Kraus and most recently from G. Lazard, who published a critical edition and translation of the surviving fragments of Shuhayd's Persian poetry together with a comprehensive bibliography. The present attempt to add a bit more flesh to Shuhayd's still decidedly skeletal biography is based essentially on just two texts, one of which has been known all along, but has not, I think, previously been understood correctly; the other has only recently become available.