Use of the term ‘exegesis’ is now so general that scholars in the field of scriptural studies must have sensed an impingement upon their conventional prerogative. If, perhaps, they are justified in so doing, they might none the less be prepared to acknowledge the value of ancillary functions accumulated in its extension into areas beyond its standard application to literature. While it may be that these can be encompassed in the general shift from self-consciously ‘interpretative’ to epistemologically ‘hermeneutic’, it would seem more practical to identify as ‘exegesis’ any and every act of perception. That, of course, is facilitated by the now conventional notion of ‘text’ espoused by most practitioners of structuralism. Whether one equates every datum of perception as somehow ‘textual’ or, conversely, the perception of every text as dependent upon the totality of experience, does not really matter. ‘Exegesis’ is conveniently inclusive and may be thought of general utility in the service of every taste and all analytical techniques. As such, it is ineluctably present in every transaction of the intellect: one observes, hears, reads, and makes the necessary adjustments in aid of understanding. In the very interests of survival, one seldom elects not to understand. It is the ‘necessary adjustments’ that require description, abundantly documented in the textbooks of literary criticism: from the rhetorical ‘naming of parts’ to contemporary discourse analysis. If it seems difficult to add to that vast corpus of technical terms, it is certainly possible to take a stand in respect of their presumptive efficiency.

The role of metaphor in the generation of descriptive terms is a commonplace of lexicography. Agency is usually identified as analogy, and the transfer itself analysed in terms of real or imagined similarity, e.g. ‘goth’ = barbaric, ‘gypsy’ = migrant, ‘vandal’ = destructive. Strictly defined, these exemplify metonymy, a species of metaphor found particularly in toponyms and gentilics. Development of such epithets as'‘arab’, ‘deutsch’ and ‘sūdān’ may be seen as a complementary process, wherein the common attribute is given a specific referent. Thought it is no longer, since Jakobson, deemed quite proper to define metonymy as metaphor, a symbolic and often arbitrary element in the transfer might be thought to justify that interpretation, as for instance in the gentilic Iberian or the appellative Qadariyya. While ultimately of less significance than context, etymology is seldom neglected in such investigations, may, indeed, become a dominant feature, as in the perennial discussion of ḫāpirū: 'ibrī = ‘hebrew’. It is my intention in the following lines to examine the incidence and possible origins of an appellative well known from early Arabic historiography.

The study of Muslim rule and its vestiges in medieval Sicily has a long and distinguished pedigree. In the nineteenth century the impetus was both scholarly and political, to which the monumental works of Amari and De Mas Latrie bear eloquent witness. In more recent times the motive has been simple and straightforward curiosity about a remarkable instance of cultural symbiosis. The parameters are now either linguistic or historical or both, and the gain is substantial. With the reprint exactly a century after its original publication in Palermo of Salvatore Cusa's I Diplomi greci ed Arabi di Sicilia one might be permitted to suppose that a reassessment of the earlier scholarship is underway. But the commemoration is itself curiously unhelpful: we are offered a typographically reduced replica of the original innocent of comment save for two pages of very general observations by Albrecht Noth on the significance of Cusa's compilation for students of Islamic history. Neither reference to subsequent work nor indication of a present project is included, a circumstance that only with generosity could be regarded as tantalizing.

Although any lingering doubts about the lexical value of the Semitic particle bal ought by now to have been dispelled by the observations of Labuschagne and Aartun, a few further remarks on the problems involved in contextual analysis might not be altogether superfluous. While this particular instance of etymological overkill is not included there, the several pitfalls encountered in the practice respectively of comparative philology and textual emendation are meticulously documented in Barr's monograph on methodology. And the dangers of ‘pan-Ugaritism’ have been signalled more than once. The purport of these caveats is clear: textual problems will not always (or even often) be solved by reference to cognates. Occasional solutions may be lexical, seldom morphological, and even more rarely syntactic, since ‘meaning’ is, in the final analysis, a product of context.

Amongst the contributions to a recent volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Ugaritic studies is a paper devoted to analysis of the problems involved in description of Semitic prosody. While the data adduced there are explicitly limited to Ugaritic and Hebrew verse, the author's method entails consideration of such general matters as the definition of metre and parallelism. Since these are, as is well known, the traditional parameters in virtually every discussion of Biblical poetry, Professor Pardee's study evokes (and is clearly intended so to do) examination of all the categories and terms hitherto employed to describe the several and occasionally disparate phenomena collectively adduced as evidence of poetic composition. Historical surveys of the subject are now abundant, more or less easily accessible and not very often undertaken except as preface to special pleading on behalf of one or other of the criteria so far discerned for distinguishing poetry from prose.

In the recently published volume of his collected papers Professor S. E. Loewenstamm includes two studies (here amplified) dealing with a feature of Semitic prosody described by him as ‘expanded colon’.His thesis is disarmingly straightforward: non-contiguous and, in some cases, contiguous repetition exhibits under certain conditions the deliberate expansion of a primary poetic structure, called ‘basic formula’ (p. 287), ‘simple basic formula’ (p. 289), ‘basic formulation’ (p. 291), ‘basic colon’ (p. 293). Production of an ‘expanded colon’, in contrast to mere ‘repetitive parallelism’ (p. 283 n. 8), requires (1) a ‘repetitive formula’, (2) an ‘intervening formula’, and (3) a ‘complementary formula’ (pp. 284–5, 293–4). Component (1) must at first utterance be grammatically incomplete; component (2) may consist of a vocative and/or grammatical subject; component (3) must render the ‘repetitive formula’ at second utterance grammatically complete. Thus, CTA 2:IV:8–9

in which the first tow segements (‘ Now your enemy, O Baal/Now your enemy you shall smite’) constitute the ‘expanded colon’, the third (‘Now you shall subdue your oppressor’) being merely parallel.

Though beset with dispute, wavering conviction and a fair amount of inconsistency, most theories of Biblical prosody exhibit a dominant concern with phonology. Since one at least of the phenomena under scrutiny is metre, this shared propensity is hardly surprising, conditioned as a matter of course by Classical literature and the European tradition, but also by considerable evidence from the proximate sphere of other Semitic literatures. Comment upon the poetry in Hebrew scripture is as ancient as Philo and as varied as could be expected from two millennia of scholarship characterized by evolving method and changing fashion. For the metrical component, acknowledgement of more than one period of poetic production has enabled a chronological hypothesis to accommodate several systems that would otherwise, restricted to the data of the Massoretic text, be in mild competition if not, indeed, severe conflict. At stake is the unit of stress: its identity, distribution and frequency, a phonological quest rarely modified by reference to morphology. A notable exception is the attention recently directed to line internal juncture (sandhi) of which the primary effect is to eliminate or at least blur word boundaries. While the value of this operation for describing an evolution from accentual to quantitative prosody cannot be denied, its practical consequence may be merely characterization of the poetic line as a more or less constant number of syllables. In such an arbitrary continuum the location of stress is no easier than in the admittedly simplistic but nonetheless pragmatic identification of word with ictus. To this end Massoretic accentuation, whatever its shortcomings, has proved remarkably adaptable.

One of the several branches of Islamic law in which practice diverged most sharply from theory was the law of commerce. The divergence is especially striking in two respects: regular imposition of taxes regarded by the shariī‘a as illegal, and reliance upon written documents as legal proof of transactions for which juridical theory demanded only oral evidence of witnesses. A third problematical aspect of commercial law was the juridical status of the non-Muslim merchant in Dār al-Islām. Matters pertaining thereto were loosely subsumed by the jurists under the term amān, associated specifically with the law of war, and defined by recourse to as much precedent as could be gleaned from the Qur'ān and from the example of the Prophet and of the earliest Muslim communities. The consequences of this procedure have posed several historical problems upon which it is hoped the present paper will throw some light.

As a normative discipline Qur'anic exegesis shares both principles and terminology with the other Islamic sciences, and as such is not likely to have been articulated before the third/ninth century. Prominent in the fully elaborated system, as for example exhibited in the work of al-Zamakhshari (d. 538/1143), are the complementary principles of qiyās and taqdīr. While the former is commonly understood to represent the hermeneutical instrument called analogy, a typological description of qiyās will distinguish between applications of the principle which depend upon a textual similarity, and those which are derived from a rational or causal relation. Of the first type it may be said that there are as many kinds of analogy as there are means of establishing external (grammatical and lexical) affinity between different scriptural contexts. Underlying the second type of analogy is a unifying principle (ratio) independent of textual similarities, both explicit and implicit. In theory, if not always in practice, one may differentiate the two types of qiyās by reference to the incidence in each of what I have called the complementary principle of taqdīr. This term, of which the most common rendering ‘supplementation’ (Ergänzung), alluding to only one aspect of the procedure in question, is not quite satisfactory, signifies reconstruction or restoration (Wiederherstellung: restitutio in integrum), namely, of a scriptural context or passage. Now, while the elaboration of grammatical qiyās by the so-called ‘Basran school’ was characterized by an almost unlimited application of that principle, two reservations must be made.

Though not invariably susceptible of demonstration, the influence of Classical Arabic upon the popular literature of Arabic-speaking Muslims in North Africa may safely be assumed. ‘Popular’, indeed, the early Islamic verse forms (ši'r mawzūn) and the later stanzaic compositions (klam or ālat al-andalus) have remained, and in these, even when modified by local tradition, the source of inspiration is easily recognized. Less clear is the transfer pattern of classical elements in the strictly vernacular poetry (klam melḥūn) of the same people. It is this category of composition with which the following observations are concerned, and wḥich suggested selection of the term ‘vernacular’ rather than ‘popular’. A further factor contributory to isolation of this topic is the existence of a vernacular literature amongst non-Muslim Arabic speakers in North Africa: the Jewish communities. There, owing both to Judaeo-Arabic orthography and to confessional motives in the selection of theme, the tyranny of Classical Arabic is considerably weakened, to some extent a consequence of social (educational) lines of demarcation. Important, however, are the affinities between the vernacular compositions of both groups, especially in matters relating to rhetorical convention and prosodic structure.

The decolonization of history in the Islamic world has for a number of years proved a fascinating and profitable pursuit. For that portion of North Africa occupied by the French this process has consisted for the most part of two more or less separate activities: studies in depth and detail for the period after 1830, and for the preceding centuries (700-1830) a number of very general and frequently superficial recommendations, reflecting a sincere but not always clearly planned intention to controvert the presuppositions seen to underly colonialist historiography.

Since independence the countries of North Africa have been occupied almost exclusively with the establishment of a new society. An important part of this activity has been directed towards a solution to the problem of symbols and values: the construction of an image of themselves for their own contemplation and for export to the world outside. One aspect of this general problem of acculturation is concerned with interpretations of history and the evaluation of one's own place in historical evolution. Starting from the premiss that North African history has largely been a monopoly of French scholarship since 1830, contemporary historical writers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have found it essential, before entering upon problems of historical interpretation, to rewrite their own history. Discovery of this first requisite has generated a spirit shared by all those writers preoccupied with this problem, however much they might disagree on solutions to it, which is best expressed by the phrase ‘décoloniser l'histoire’. The subject is vast, and I should like here only to indicate several of the problems, with their proposed solutions, so far treated by writers dealing with the history of Algeria.

Among the Arabic documents preserved in the archives of Sicily is one relating to the affairs of the Jewish community in Siracusa at the end of thetwelfth century. Belonging by origin to the episcopal church of Cefalù, it isnow in the Archivio di Stato at Palermo (Tabulario della Chiesa Vescovile di Cefalù, Perg. no. 25), and was included in the collection published by S. Cusain 1868–82.

Venetian preponderance in Mediterranean commerce during the late Middle Ages is attested in many ways. Muslim and European chronicles, travellers' reports from the Levant, and business records of the Republic illustrate the concern of Venice with the affairs, commercial and political, of the Muslim states in the Mediterranean. One striking aspect of this preponderance is found in the contemporary commercial treaties concluded between Muslim rulers and the Christian states of southern Europe.

Of twenty commercial treaties concluded between the Mamluk Sultans and the Kepublic of Venice one of 913/1507 is unique in that it was negotiated not, as was traditional, by a Venetian representative in Egypt but by a Mamluk ambassador in Venice.

I N 1508 the Mediterranean port of Bādis, located on the coast of the Rīf on approximately the same meridian as Malaga, shared with Salé and Azemmour on the Atlantic the distinction of being the only Moroccan ports not occupied by either the Spanish or Portuguese. Subject to the Wattasids at Fās, at about the beginning of the sixteenth century Bādis had been granted by the reigning Wattāsidto a cousin, who for some years ruled almost independently there. Because of its geographical situation the port was of considerable interest to the Republic of Venice, two of whose merchant fleets had occasion to call there in the course of their voyages along the coasts of the Mediterranean.

Venetian interest in Bādis is illustrated by two Arabic documents: a treaty and its covering letter addressed by the Amīr of Bādis to the Doge of Venice, written in the year 1508 and concerning the establishment of commercial relations. The originals of these two documents are preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) where also, in the Libri Commemoriali, transcripts of their contemporary Italian translations are to be found. These translations are reproduced here together with the Arabic texts.