In my earlier examination of the phenomenon of taḍmīn in Arabic poetry, I attempted to show how it evolved from the status of a defect into a poetic device. But I could not at that time offer any explanation that would reasonably account for this development. Moreover, I have come to realize that my treatment of the term as referring to those instances where the full meaning of an idea started in one line emerges only in the succeeding line(s), viz. enjamb-ment, did not adequately account for its subtleties; and, more importantly, it ignored other phenomena which are also subsumed under the term, though they have no obvious connection with enjambment. It is precisely these lacunae that I intend to fill in the present study. For purposes of analysis I will designate the over-running of lines as ‘grammatical taḍmīn’ since the relationship in such cases is either syntactic or semantic, although still other, subtler relationships within this broad classification are demonstrable. The term is also used for cases where a poet deliberately quotes, with or without indication, from poems or statements by others: this will be discussed under ‘rhetorical taḍmīn’. Yet another use of the term arose from the introduction of philosophical thought into theoretical speculation, specifically in the area of scriptural interpretation: this I will designate as ‘hermeneutical taḍmīn’.

Tamīm al-Dārī was one of the Prophet Muḥammad's companions and an early convert to Islam from Christianity. His name is most closely associated with the eschatological traditions concerning the Dajjāl (the Muslim Antichrist), and various early ascetic ideas. The best known story involving him is in fact his meeting with the Dajjāl, after he and others of his tribe are shipwrecked on a mysterious island. He is taken by a creature called al-jassāsa to meet a chained man in a monastery, who asks the tribesmen a number of questions about the state of the outside world, most of which are related to the area of the Rift Valley in Syria. After they answer him, he proclaims himself to be the Dajjāl and announces that he is about to be let loose on the world. Somehow Tamīm and his companions manage to leave the island and come to visit the Prophet, who hears their story and relates it to the populace of Medina. However, in spite of this story, historical material about him, as is common with the Prophet's companions in general, is hard to come by. In this article I will explore some of the historical traditions connected with this figure and try to establish which material is reliable and which is not.

The Islamic institution of the ribāṭ appears to have made its initial appearance along the North African coast, in what is today Tunisia, during the second/eighth century. In the first phase of its development, the ribāṭ was essentially a fortress located at a sensitive point along the Islamic frontier, garrisoned by pious individuals who envisaged their vocation as participation in the jihād, the defence of the lands of Islam against external foes.

It is a fundamental point of comparative and historical linguistics that genealogical affiliation can only be established on the basis of concrete linguistic features, the more central the feature the more important for classificatory purposes. While there is no absolute consensus about how a central linguistic feature be identified, it can be taken as axiomatic that long-term reconstruction and classification rests most fundamentally on phonological and morphological criteria. Of these two, Hetzron (1976b) has argued that it is the morphological which is the most important because morphology represents the level of grammar that is both more complex and more arbitrary in the sense that the sound-meaning dyad has no natural basis. Precisely this arbitrariness ensures that morphological correspondences are relatively unlikely to be due to chance.

The last recorded case of sati in India, the murder (for such it undoubtedly was) of Roop Kanwar, which took place in the large Rajasthani village of Deorala in 1987, has had many reverberations. In particular, it has served as a focus for international and Indian women activists' opposition to continuing gender violence and to male domination in general. Not surprisingly, the responses have been wide-ranging, from individual and collective acts of feminist solidarity to various attempts at local level, mainly by men and political agencies, to discredit this particular women's movement.

The year 1998 marks the seven-hundredth anniversary of the initial composition of the book associated with Marco Polo, Le devisament dou monde. As the first European to claim that he had been to China and back (not to mention that he had travelled extensively elsewhere in Asia), Polo has become a household name. He has been credited with the introduction of noodles into Italy and of spaghetti into China. With perhaps greater warrant, he has been cited as an authority onȔinter aliaȔthe capital of the Mongol Great Khan Qubilai, on the Mongol postal relay system, on the trade in horses across the Arabian Sea, and on political conditions on the north-west frontier of India in the mid thirteenth century. The Marco Polo bibliography published in 1986 contained over 2,300 items in European languages alone.

Up to this point I have attempted to show how Shen Nung was portrayed in late Warring States and early Han texts. I have also reviewed what we know about Nung (or Chu) and Lieh Shan shih, Keng-fu (Plough Father), and T'ien-tsu (Field Ancestor), since it may be one or all four of these figures that comes to be known as Shen Nung.

We can argue nothing for certain on this, and certainly T'ien-tsu in the Shih, was, we assume, a god of the Chou. But that point aside, there seems to be good reason to think that Shen Nung was originally a farming god of the Shang people. He is the hero who invented the plough, and the god to whom they turned when they needed rain. Ultimately, this may have been Hsieh, the first-born of the Shang people, known to us in our texts as Shu-chün or Yi-chün. That Shen Nung would become prominent only in texts that date from the late Chou should be no surprise; we should expect him to be overshadowed in early Chou times by their hero Hou Chi.

It is important to keep in mind as we proceed that in the materials we have examined so far, we have seen repeated references to ‘fire’ and ‘rain’ and ‘drought’. Ritual ways of producing rainfall and combating the drought could involve fire (yen-huo, in Shih, 211); they might also involve ‘invocations’, charging the drought demon to ‘Go to the north!’ (Shan-hai ching).