One of the most controversial aspects of Hittite phonology is the question of the significance, if any, of the so-called plene-writing of vowels. Explanations for this practice have been sought in a variety of directions. Some have seen in it the continuation of a tradition inherited from predecessors of the Hittite cuneiform syllabary with perhaps little relevance to the facts of the Hittite language. Others have been more confident in seeing in it a method of representing some real linguistic feature, such as vowel length, while inconsistencies or apparent inconsistencies in its use have led others to the conclusion that it has often no functional significance at all. No full-scale investigation of the phenomenon covering the entire Hittite corpus has yet been carried out, nor is such an attempt practicable here. The present paper has the restricted aim of investigating one particular phenomenon, the occurrence of plene-writing in different syllables in different inflexional forms of the same words, and the material drawn upon is chiefly Old and Middle Hittite, since it seems likely that certain patterns of variation in the use of plene-writing were quite early disturbed by analogical levelling within paradigms, or eliminated by the abandonment of plene-writing in the words in question; nevertheless, I believe that the oldest texts in particular still preserve enough evidence for these patterns to be discernible and that the reasons for them are intelligible in historical terms.

The problem of the lawfulness of accepting and holding office under an illegitimate ruler posed itself in the Imāmī Shī'a from an early date. Imāmī Shī‘ism considered the historical caliphate, with the exception of the reign of 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, as invariably usurpatory and illegitimate. The rule of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet was the exclusive right of 'Alī and the Imams from among his descendants. They had been pushed aside from their rightful position, first by the three caliphs preceding 'Alī and later, by the Umayyads and the 'Abbāsids. On the other hand, the Imams from the fourth, 'Alī Zayn al-'Ābidīn, had ceased actively to seek to rule through the overthrow of the usurpatory caliphate. The sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Ṣādiq, rejected in particular any offer of help to restore him to his rightful position by force and strictly forbade his followers to engage in revolutionary activity on behalf of the Imams until the rise of the Qā'im Imam who would claim his right to rule with the sword. This quietist policy was consistently followed by his successors and came to be reflected in Imāmī belief and doctrine which did not anticipate a return of the Imams to rule before the coming of the eschatological Mahdī.

That the dialectical technique of Muslim kalām is a borrowing from Christian theology is no secret. Its extra-Islamic origin has indeed been asserted by van Ess with great forthrightness in the context of his recent publication of an early kalām text. The text in question is an anti-Qadarite polemic ascribed to al-Hasan b. Muhammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya (d. c. 100 A.H.); it lacks a title, but may conveniently be designated Questions against the Qadarites. Van Ess accepts the ascription, and dates the tract to the 70s of the first century of the Hijra. Since the text contains no contemporary historical reference or colour, and. the ascription rests on the sole authority of the Zaydī imāam al-Hādī (d. 298), the case for so early a dating rests heavily on the theological style and content of the tract. Many of the arguments advanced by van Ess are questionable, and the result could not be said to constitute proof. But it would be churlish to reject the case for an early dating out of hand, and difficult to sustain one later than the first half of the second century. The text is thus an archaic one, and provides an appropriate starting-point for an inquiry into the origins of kalām.

According to Muslim tradition, some time after the spring of Zamzam had been caused by God to gush forth for Hagar and Ishmael following their expulsion into the wilderness by Abraham, it disappeared. Because of the sins of the tribe of Jurhum, which until then had possessed Mecca and the control of its sanctuary (wilāyat al-bayt), Zamzam, the well of the sanctuary, dis-appeared or was hidden, and Jurhum was driven out of Mecca and lost the wilāyat al-bayt. The rediscovery of the well is associated with the grandfather of the Prophet, 'Abd al-Muttahb. At a much later, but unspecified date, we are told, he experienced a dream in which the place of Zamzam was revealed to him. From this time on the well, according to tradition, enjoyed a continuous existence, it being one of the features of the Meccan sanctuary which were taken over when Muhammad adopted the sanctuary for Islam. Zamzam, however, is not the only well associated with the Meccan sanctuary. Muslim tradition knows too of a dry pit inside the Ka'ba which is sometimes referred to as the ‘well of the Ka'ba’.

Patricia Crone and Michael Cook take an extreme stand in their study of early Islam when they dismiss Islamic Egypt as an utterly depersonalized and assimilated part of the orthodox Muslim polity. ‘Egypt in Islam was not so much a nation or even a country as simply a place.’ In their view the Copts with their indigenous traditions and civilization had become exiles in their own country. Rustic Coptic culture, if compared with the urban Christian intellectual heritage of Syria and Mesopotamia, lacked the stamina to assert itself in. the new religious setting, and receded to the countryside. In the opinion of the authors, Egypt surrendered with extreme readiness her distinctive provincial features to the new Islamic civilization and developed into the most loyal and most prolific, yet at the same time the most parochial and imitative stronghold of sunnī Islam. They flatly disclaim any specific Egyptian contribution to medieval Islam, even during the two centuries of schismatic Fatimid ascendancy when Cairo was the centre of an intrinsically Egyptian Empire with universal claims. So far the thesis of Hagarism.

Arabic sources have preserved the texts of seven treaties concluded in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century between the Mamluk sultans al-Ẓāhir Baybars and al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn on the one hand, and various authorities in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and in Antioch-Tripoli on the other. Four are given by the Egyptian chancery clerk al-Qalqashandī in his encyclopaedic compilation, Ṣubḥ al-a'shā. This was completed in 814/1412, over 120 years after the extinction of the Frankish states, but the treaties were transcribed (as al-Qalqashandī tells us) from an earlier work by a clerk in Qalāwūn's chancery, Muḥammad b. al-Mukarram. Two of Qalāwūn's other treaties are found in his biography, written by the contemporary chancery clerk, Muḥyi al-Dīn ibn 'Abd al-Ẓāhir (d. 692/1292). Yet another of Qalāwūn's treaties was preserved by the contemporary chronicler, Baybars al-Manṣurī (d. 725/1325).

Phonetic adjustment in conversational exchange between Arabs of different nationalities is a fundamental, subtle aspect of Educated Spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant (ESA). More often than not educated Arabs adjust to a ‘classical norm’ of a voiceless uvular plosive (q), usually corresponding to a voiced velar plosive (g) or a glottal plosive (ʢ) in most vernaculars of our region, in a conscious or unconscious attempt both to elevate and to ‘koineize’ their speech. What follows attempts, inter alia, to show something of the relationships between the variants of this diaphonemic entity and such extra-linguistic factors as the biographies of collocutors and speech function, and to illustrate the fact that items with [q] serve the purposes of modernization in the area.

The Mahānubhāvas are a Maharashtrian bhakti sect founded in the second half of the thirteenth century. Like other Indian bhakti sects, the Mahānubhāvas practise exclusive devotion to one god, but do not thereby deny the existence of other gods. Rather, Mahānubhāvas hold that ‘the gods’ form a category of real beings distinct from jīvas, the world, and God. Mahānubhāva thought pays a good deal of attention to the gods; yet this attention does not compromise Mahānubhāva monotheism.

In Sino-Tibetan (1972) P. K. Benedict has offered two different accounts of the significance, for Tibeto-Burman (TB) and Sino-Tibetan (ST) reconstruction, of the three types of ‘vocalic alternation’ in the Written Tibetan (WT) verb, a/a/o, e/a/o and o/a/o. His original account (c. 1942–3) reads: ‘Tibetan, however, shows a puzzling type of vocalic alternation in its verbs, in which stems in a regularly take o in the imperative and often either o or e in the present… The e of the present stem is possibly to be interpreted as an effect of the prefixed element’- <*a- [ə-]. Similarly, the o of the imperative stem has perhaps been conditioned by an archaic imperative suffixc -o…' (pp. 126–7). His revised version (1972) reads: ‘The Chinese vowels cannot be explained without setting up a 7-vowel system for ST … and Tibetan verb forms reflect this early system as follows:

ST/TB *a = T aa (no alternation, except in the imperative)

ST/TB *â = T ao

ST/TB *ə = T ae

We can now, by way of illustration, reconstruct TB *g-sât (T gsod-pa, Pf.bsad) …; also TB*səm “breath, voice, spirit”: T sem(s)-pa. Pf. semsbsams “think” …' (p. 126, n. 344).

fa In both the Prefix and Suffix conjugations of ‘Afar the distinction between perfect and non-perfect aspects is generally maintained in main verb forms. Mood forms, such as the imperative and jussive, are, however, exceptions to this. The morphological means whereby this aspect distinction is realized is essentially different in the two conjugations although historically one of these means derives from the other. One accidental result of this historical derivation is that two affixes of identical form have come to occupy comparable locations in the structure of the verb. One of them occurs in certain Prefix verb forms, the other in certain Suffix verb forms. In most constructions the functions of these affixes are quite distinct. There are, however, certain constructions in the two conjugations, which clearly correspond functionally to each other, but in which the distribution of the two affixes is anomalous. In this paper the questions are looked at in the light of an internal reconstruction of some areas of the verbal system, with the result that a hypothesis of partial (contextually determined) restructuring is presented as the most plausible means of explaining the anomalies.