Pre-twentieth century Sikh tradition says that Bhāī Gurdās, the scribe of Guru Arjanās text of the Adi Granth, was troubled by a major doubt as he wrote the words the Guru dictated to him: faced with poems attributed to figures like Kabīr and Nāmdev (collectively known as bhagats in the tradition), Gurdās began to wonder whether Guru Arjan was not composing the poems himself and ascribing them to the bhagats. Realizing what was troubling Bhāī Gurdās, the Guru instructed the scribe to rise early the next morning and wait outside the tent where the dictation of the Granth took place every day. When he did, Gurdās was surprised to see the Guru conversing with a number of the ībhagats in ‘spiritual form’. The bhagats, it turned out, came to the tent every morning to ensure that their compositions were included in Guru Arjan's Granth. Gurdās was suitably impressed by the display and acknowledged without further question the authenticity of their compositions.

This article presents a stylistic analysis of a poem which we shall call Macaan iyo Qadhaadh, ‘Sweet and bitter’ by the Somali poet Axmed Ismaciil Diiriye ‘Qaasim’. It will show ways in which the language has been crafted syntactically, metrically, alliteratively and in other ways so as to contribute to the power and meaning of the poem as a whole. A stylistics-based approach has been followed looking at the actual language structures and stylistic devices used in the poem and ideas are proposed on their contribution to the meaning and power of the poem. Cureton (1992) has been influential in the way grouping of lines has been dealt with and in how prolongation in the poem has been presented and discussed.

John Dryden's ‘Religio laid’, a defence in rhyming couplets of English Protestantism, is not an obvious point of departure for this study of a Muslim poem about juristic authority. There is value however in the comparison for the contrasts that emerge. Dryden's poem first defends Christianity against an Enlightenment Deism, and then situates English Protestantism between the two extremes of Papism and ‘the private spirit’ (‘Occasioned by great zeal and little thought’). Ibn ‘Ābidīn's ‘Chaplets on the mufti's task’, written in the nineteenth century, is a highly condensed version of a conventional academic work of the type sometimes called ‘manuals for muftis’ or adab al-muftī. It aims to inform the professional mufti and the educated jurist of a methodology for the discovery of a rule of law. It speaks of secure authority; very different from the challenged, if triumphant, authority of English Protestantism in the seventeenth century.

In 1260 an army of Egyptian Mamluks, led by Sultan Qutuz, defeated a Mongol army from the Ilkhanate led by Ketbugha, at the battle of Ayn Jalut (Ain Jalut), ‘Goliath's Well’, in Palestine. Because this campaign marked the furthest advance of the Mongols in the Middle East, scholars have paid considerable attention to its military and political significance. However, one potential aspect of Ilkhanid-Mamluk relations has only been mentioned casually; examination of the role and image of the Kipchaks in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries may illustrate a much broader feature of the history of the Mongol Empire and its successor states.

The motto of this article, taken from a novel by Rushdie (1995: 3), briefly summarizes its theme. The ‘traveller’ I wish to discuss is the love story of Abimanyu and Ksiti (or Modern Javanese Siti) Sundari. The earliest account of this story seems to be the Old Javanese kakawin Gaoṭkacâsraya (‘Gaṭotkaca's help’), said to be composed by mpuPanuluh in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (Zoetmulder, 1974: 277). But how the story travelled and what mouths it ended up in! In 1990, for instance, Kamal Z. recorded his performance of the Javanese pop song ‘Siti Sundari’, composed by himself, in which he sang the following lines:

It is not necessary to emphasize the importance of writing in the culture of Ancient Egypt. The ancient Nile Valley dwellers' cult of writing is famous, while the Egyptian language has the longest written continuity known in history. At the same time, however, we linguists know painfully little about the origin of the Egyptian verb zš ‘to write’ because of the apparent lack of reliable Afro-Asiatic cognates.

The Aramaic clay tablets presented here are legal documents with Neo-Assyrian formularies. These texts are important as they attest to an Akkadian legal tradition and its adaptation to an Aramaic context. The fact that the writing material is clay is exceptional since one would expect an Aramaic document to be written on parchment or papyrus. Published examples of Aramaic documents on clay are relatively uncommon although more are surfacing.