It would be all but impossible to compile a complete list of all the Arabic writers who used Ibn Isḥāq's Biography of the Prophet. In the Introduction to my translation of his work1 I endeavoured to collect and include anything of importance which other writers had quoted on the authority of Ibn Isḥāq. Among the writers whom I may have overlooked must now be mentioned Abū Nu‘aym Ahmad b. ‘Abdullah al-Ispahānī (d. 430)2 who wrote a book entitled Dalā’ilu'l-Nubၫwa.3

The ms of miscellaneous contents from which this treatise has been extracted was lent me by its owner, Shaikh Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Ḳāadir Bā Maṭraf, Assistant State Secretary to the Mukallā Government; a microfilm is now in the Library of the School.

Of the author, Muhammad Bahrak1 (H. 869/A.D. 1465 – H. 930/A.D. 1524) I have already given some account in connexion with his manual al-Nubdhah al-Muharrirah.2 Brockelmann does not, however, allude to the work from which this brief extract is drawn, Ḥilyat al-Banāt wa-'l-Bariīn.

The Arabic manuscript which forms a part of Majmū‘ No. 17, preserved in the ຒahirīya Library in Damascus, is the only fragment extant of a diary kept during the fifth/eleventh century by a contemporary historian of Baghdad, Abū ’Alī b. al-Bannā’ al-Ḥanbalī. An edition and translation of this fragment (hereafter referred to as the Diary) are given here for the first time. It covers in some detail a period of slightly more than one year, from A.H. 460 to A.H. 461 (corresponding to A.D. 1068–69), in the socio-religious history of Baghdad.

It was recently possible to establish that the Middle Iranian mäṡṡa-, miṡṡa-, later miṡa-, mūṡa- (with adjectival mūṡlja)2 used in Khotanese texts meant ‘field for seed’. The Khotanese word ttumāṡa- attested in the plural ttumāṡa in the Sanghāta-sūtra 16 b 4 corresponded to Tib. Hit ‘field, kṡetra’. The first syllable ttu- was earlier3 explained from the base tauk- by comparison with Mid. Pers., Zor. Pahlavī tōxm, Armen. loan-word tohm, NPers. tuxm. We could then take the word as *tauxma-m- > ttum-. But since Khotanese ttíman- ‘seed’ seems to derive from *tüman- from *tuγman-, we might prefer to trace ttu- to an older *tava- or *tuva- and see in it the base tav- without the enlargement by -k- in OInd. tok-: tuk-.

In investigating the nature of original Buddhism a consideration of its position as one among a number of contemporary historical systems, and of the way in which it may have arisen in opposition to the others, may be more illuminating than attempts to trace back the original doctrine through the history of the schools of Buddhism itself. The most important among these systems appear to have been those of the Ājīvakas, the Nirgranthas or Jainas, and the Lokayatas. Many other systems existed, and are occasionally discussed in the extant literature, but the majority failed to attract a substantial following and to persist as organized schools. We may mention the doctrines attributed to the Buddha's teachers, and perhaps the Iśvaravāda, if this was not simply a part of the older Brahmanical tradition (Iśvara = Prajapāti or Brahmā). The cults of Baladeva and Vāsudeva, which with the Kṛṣṇa and other legends were later integrated into Vaisnavism, and which probably were non-Brahmanical in origin, seem from Jaina references to have existed already in eastern India. A heterodox proto- may date back to the period of the origin of Buddhism.

In a previous article I described certain features of that form of Chinese short story which is most conveniently known as hua-pen. Illustrations were taken in the main from a number of stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo, a collection published in Soochow in or about the year 1621.

As I indicated, however, the stories of the Ku chin hsiao shuo show wide variations in age and in the degree to which they qualify to be regarded as genuine hua-pen, that is to say, as written versions of the actual stories told by the story-tellers of the Sung, Yüan, or Ming periods.

The people whose language forms the subject of this article live in the Belgian Congo, on the sandy plateau immediately to the north-east of Léopoldville. Known to the neighbouring Kongo-speaking tribes as Bamfununga or Bamfunika, they call themselves Bamfinu, and their language Emfinu. Following the usual practice of referring to Bantu languages in English by means of the stem of the vernacular name, this particular language is termed Mfinu.

Although a Bantu language, Mfinu displays a number of features that are not found elsewhere in the Bantu family, except to a certain extent in some of the neighbouring languages.

Lilias E. Aemsteong in her article ‘The phonetic structure of Somali’ has shown that there is a correlation in this dialect of Somali between tone patterns and grammatical gender in certain types of Nouns. Moreover, at many points in her article she implies by her tone markings that there is also a correlation between other grammatical categories and tone patterns. She states, for example, that ‘plurals of both masculine and feminine nouns are pronounced with the mid-level tones in all syllables … exceptions are the feminine words … ending in in the singular …‘.

Various writers on the language of the Fulani, or, have included in their accounts a description of the three Voices of the verbal system, and a brief statement of their role in the operation of the language. But no detailed analysis of Voice in Fula has yet been published. Such an analysis is attempted in this article, on the basis of the speech of two informants from Gombe Division in Northern Nigeria.

2. The term Voice is here applied to each of the three series of verbal affixes which are found in Fula. The tense affixes fall into three series, differing in distribution and behaviour, and to some extent in meaning. These series cut across the tenses, so that each tense (except for the Negative of Quality and the Imperative) has three different tense-signs associated with it, each belonging to a different series. Thus in the two sets of sentences.

In the first part of this study we followed the development of the Ṣūfī ṭarīqa organization in Somaliland after the introduction of Islam and examined the functions exercised by Ṣūfī communities in the social structure. We interpreted the closer social and genealogical assimilation of jamā‘as among the nomadic tribes in terms of lack of arable land available for the foundation of independent settlements. It was argued that the genealogical idiom in which social relations are normally described, especially amongst the nomads, is extended to the jamā‘as by virtue of their identification with the Arabian genealogies of their sheiks. The incorporation of such Ṣūfi genealogies was held to explain how the Somali lineage system is in its furthest extension extrapolated to the Qurayshitic lineage of the Prophet.

IN my book Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (1937) there emerged from the treatment of these three topics a picture of some features of the Zande mind, revealing itself often as a suspicious, distrustful, hostile mind. Another facet of this mentality is revealed in the Zande concept of sanza (pi. asanza).

In connexion with Professor Wittek's article ‘Devshirme and sharī'a’ in BSOAS, xyn, 2, pp. 271–8, a passage in Idrīs Bitlīsī's Hasht bihisht is of interest, for there the author, far from feeling any incompatibility between the devshirme and the sharī'a, even shows the former as justified by the latter.