It may seem strange that I should have chosen religious controversy as a subject on which to address members of the Royal Asiatic Society on the occasion of its centenary. But it is because, and not in spite of, the fact that the Society embraces so many Christian and Muhammadan scholars that I venture to exhume a mujādala which lived and died in the reign of the Caliph Al-Ma'mūn.

That so attractive and useful a historical manual as the Kitábu'l-Fakhrí should be represented, so far as is known, by only one complete manuscript, on which all the printed editions are based, is a fact so remarkable that Ahlwardt, who first edited the text in 1860, has thought it necessary to suggest an explanation. Good as this manuscript appears to be, it presents several lacunæ, and in particular some uncertainty prevails as to the name of the author and the proper title of the work. On these questions the Persian manuscript which forms the subject of this notice throws a certain amount of light.

The early beginnings of grammatical and lexicographical studies of the Arabic language are said to have been due to the desire to enable the many converts to Islam to understand the meanings of the Holy Book correctly as their languages differed and the Qur'ān contained many words and expressions which were by no means clear to the Arabs themselves. It is not surprising therefore to find that the chief of the early interpreters of the Qur'ān, Ibn 'Abbās, is stated to have been learned in “Lugha” i.e. lexicography or interpretation of words. The real home however, of these studies lay in the borderland towards Persia, in the newly founded towns of al-Baṣra and al-Kūufa. As the originator of these studies generally, Abul-Aswad ad-Du'ali is named. His work has not come down to us, but it can only have consisted of a few general notes. The man, if judged by the poems which have been preserved in a Dīwān edited by Nöldeke and Rescher, gives the impression of not being endowed with high ideals, but conceited beyond the measure of his own worth. As an example that circles existed in his time in which the display of strange words was appreciated, a poem rhyming upon the letter Dāl may serve, in which he defies his adversary to produce one upon the same rhyme.

A Few years ago I prepared a statistical comparison of the metres used by Hafiz in his Persian ghazals and those employed by the Urdu poet Atish, which appears in this Society's Journal (JRAS. 1917, p. 383). I have recently, in connexion with the revision of a translation which I made twelve years ago of the Arabic poet Mutanabbi, the publication of which remains delayed by various reasons, mainly financial, completed an analysis of the metres employed by Mutanabbi. In Dieterici's edition of Mutanabbi there are 287 separate poems of varying length, the average being about 19 baits. The metres of these poems arranged in order of frequency are as follows:—