So much attention has been concentrated on the doctrines on which Christians and Muslims differ that often it is not realized how closely their philosophical presuppositions agree on many matters. In the following pages, which form a brief comparison of Ash'arite theology as represented by al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153) in his Nihāyatu-l-Iqdām fī ‘ilmi’ l-kalām with Catholic theology as represented by St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) in his Summa contra Gentiles, an attempt is made to bring points of agreement into prominence.

The Summa contra Gentiles possesses such enormous value in itself that the primary object of its composition has been lost sight of. Yet the connexion between it and Islam is indissoluble. It was written at the request of the Master-General of the Dominicans, Raymund of Pinnaforte, with the express purpose of convincing the Muslims of Spain of the rational basis of Christianity and the errors of their own religion. In the second chapter of the Summa (quae sit auctoris intentio) St. Thomas particularly singles out Muhammadans. Jews, he says, can be refuted from the Old Testament; heretics from the New Testament; but Machomestitae et Pagani can only be convinced by natural reason. And it is to natural reason that he proceeds to appeal.

Though none was better equipped than St. Thomas to undertake an exposition of the Catholic Faith, it is, I think, clear that he felt himself at a disadvantage in writing against people whose books he could not read and of whom he knew only from the translations of others.

In the of the Fuad I University, vol. 9, part 1, May, 1947, pp. 25–27, Dr. K. Y. Nami has published an interesting boundary inscription now in the possession of that University. In his treatment of the inscription, however, he has overlooked the fact that a parallel text is to be found in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, iv, 949. This is unfortunate, since a correlation of the two texts is most helpful in understanding the formula contained in them.

The following are the two texts, with the renderings proposed by Nami for his inscription and by Rhodokanakis for the Corpus text.

Perhaps the first point which attracts the attention of the European lawyer who begins to study the treatment of qatl (homicide) in the text-books of Islamic law is that it is there treated, in modern parlance, more as a tort than a crime. To understand the offence properly, however, no such simple classification will suffice: instead, it is essential to view it in its historical setting and detailed development.

Under the heading of ‘uqūbāt, or punishments, Muslim lawyers treat primarily the very limited number of offences for which definite penalties (hudūd, singular hadd) are expressly prescribed in the arīa, although reference is also frequently made to the discretionary power of the Ruler or Judge suitably to punish other wrongdoing. Offences in general, moreover, are normally sub-divided into those which are regarded as exclusively involving the “right of God”, those in which both the “right of God” and the right of some individual is recognized but the former is held to preponderate, and those in which the latter is regarded as predominant. In the first category all jurists include sariqa in its two degrees (theft and brigandage), zinā (illicit sex relations), urb (wine drinking) and, when placed in this context, irtidād (apostacy from Islam); in the second, some jurists place qaf (the unproved assertion of a chaste person's incontinence), although others put this in the third category; while in the latter all include homicide and wounding. In effect an offence in which the right of God (as the Head of the community) is held to be exclusive or preponderant more or less corresponds to the modern crime, and one in which a private individual's right is regarded as predominant to the modern tort, for the chief practical difference is that in the former neither the party primarily injured nor, indeed, the Court may drop the case or allow a settlement once it has been started, while in the latter the injured party may do either at his or her discretion.

Idrisi's great geographical encyclopædia, Nuzhat al-muŠtāq al-āfāq, compiled in A.D. 1153 for King Roger II of Sicily, is formally arranged according to the seven Ptolemaic climates, each divided into ten “sections” numbered from west to east. In this arrangement, Ireland occupies the first section of the seventh climate, and Great Britain the second. Since Tuulio's publication of the third to fifth sections of this climate, it seems time that a comprehensive treatment should be attempted of the preceding two sections. Jaubert's pioneer French translation contains many attempts at identification of the place-names mentioned, which are not uniformly successful. Miller's Mappæ Arabicæ represents a considerable advance in this respect, but his identifications are not in every case acceptable, and even where correct they deserve some justificatory comment. In the following pages I have attempted to give all necessary comments, and to suggest some identifications which I believe to be an improvement on those hitherto proposed. I must express my grateful thanks to the Conservateur du Cabinet des Manuscrits of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and to the India Office Librarian in London, for the facilities which they have afforded me of consulting the manuscripts in those places; to Dr. W. B. Stevenson for generously allowing me to see the typescript of his article on Idrisi's map of Scotland before publication; to Professor I. Y. Krachkovskii and the Director of the Publichnaya Biblioteka for assisting me to obtain photographs of the Leningrad manuscript; and to Professor H. A. R. Gibb for some very helpful suggestions.

The basis of the list of biographical works in this part is the material in two articles from al-Rābitat al-‘Alawīya, a rare but learned journal published by the ‘Alawl saiyids for about four years at Batavia. This journal is unlikely to be found in Europe, unless indeed a set exists in Holland, but it is a source of major importance for the student of Hadramī history, as he will find material there not available elsewhere. I have not seen a complete set even in Hadramawt, though individual issues are to be found in various libraries.

The word(pi. ) appears in most of the lexicons which I have consulted, but it does not seem to be known in the sense of a supernatural creature, although this meaning is familiar to Yemenite folklore and dialect.

The Mss. herein described were purchased, copied, or recorded during a tour V A in Hadramawt as Colonial Research Fellow. Besides visiting the main ”f Wadi lying between Kabr Hūd and Hainin, I made investigations in the Wādī f Daw‘an, Huraida in ‘Amd, and in the course of a journey from Bal-Hᾶf, on the I coast, to Habbān on the western fringe of Wāhidi territory. Time did not I allow of a systematic recording of all existing MSS., which can be seen in i hundreds, especially as this formed only part of my programme, but those described here are the more interesting MSS. inspected. A similar tour seems to have been performed by Dr. Hamidullah in the Yemen shortly before my own investigations in Hadramawt.

The many scholars, mostly saiyids, whom I met in Hadramawt gave generously of their assistance, often placing MSS. freely at my disposal; I must; mention in particular the ‘Attās family of Huraida, and Sālih b. ‘Alī al-Hāmidī of Saiwūn. On the other hand, I have been informed, I have no means of assessing how accurately, that there are occasional individuals in the country I who possess some valuable MSS. but would rather see them moulder to pieces ‘ than show them to strangers. I understand that some saiyids keep their books in the women's part of the house, as in learned saiyid society books are reckoned fair game to the casual borrower who succeeds in abstracting them while the owner is not looking.

For anyone wishing to discover new MSS.

The main doctrines of the Shī'a are well known; Ibn Babuye, in his book The Reasons for Laws, gives a more popular view of theology.

The imam

‘Alī said: But for us God would not have created Adam, Eve, paradise, hell, heaven and earth. How shall we not be better than the angels? We knew our Lord before they did, our spirits were the first He created, and He made us speak of His unity. Then he created the angels and, when they saw that our spirits were one light, they glorified us; but we praised God that they might know that we too were created creatures. It is said that God created the five, Muḥammad, ‘Alī, Fāṭima, Ḥasan and Ḥusain seven thousand years before the world; they were before the throne. Ḥusain said: We were forms of light, circling round the throne of the Merciful; we taught the angels to praise, laud and magnify. Another expression is: A brilliant light, which was the substance (clay) of ‘Alī, passed before the angels. God created the hearts and bodies of the prophets from the substance of the highest places (‘illiyūn). An imam said: God created us from the highest places and our spirits from something higher; He created the spirits of our followers from the highest places and their bodies from something lower, so they are kin to us and their hearts yearn towards us. Then God created Adam and placed us in his loins; He commanded the angels to bow down to him to honour us. Their prostration was worship of God and respect and obedience to Adam because we were in his loins.

During the first four centuries of Islamic rule Messianic hopes ran high among the peoples of the Caliphate. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, subjected to the rule of a new and alien religion, cherished and embellished their traditions of a Messiah or Saoshyant of a God-chosen line who, in God's time, would come or return to the world, end the sufferings of the faithful and the dominion of their opponents, and establish the kingdom of God upon earth. Before very long Islam itself was affected. First in the heresies of the newly-converted, dissatisfied with the status assigned to them in what was still an Arab kingdom, grafting their old beliefs on their new faith; then in the orthodoxy of all Islam, the belief arose in a MaMhdī, a “ divinely guided one ” who, in the words of the tradition, would “ fill the earth with justice and equity as it is now filled with tyranny and oppression ”.

With the passing of empires and the flowering and disappointment of successive hopes, the tradition of the Coming grew and developed. One oppressor after another added something of himself to the portraits of the Antichrist, while the many false Messiahs, in their failure, bequeathed new details and new tokens to the Messiah yet to come. Each group had its own traditions; yet they were in no way separate and water-tight, and many ideas and beliefs passed, through converts and other channels, from one religion to another.

By no means the least impatient in their expectation of Redemption were the Jews. When the crumbling of empires under the blows of internal revolutions and external invasions seemed to portend the long awaited end, anxious Jewish eyes scanned the Time of Troubles in which they lived for signs of the coming of Messiah, and sought to identify, in the events taking place about them, the vague prophecies and traditions handed down to them of the last wars of the Messiah. It was in such times that the apocalyptic books were written.

II

In a former article (BSOAS xiii, pp. 7–22) a collation was offered of the Chester Beatty 4/10th century manuscript of al-Jumahl's Tabaqāt al-shu‘arā’ as compared with J. Hell's edition. In the following pages we have indicated or transcribed the passages contained in the Chester Beatty manuscript which are omitted in Hell's text and the derivative Cairo edition.

Students of Moslem philosophy and mysticism have often observed the highly eclectic character of that type of human thought. All Moslem speculation, philosophical and theological, no less than the Sūfī literature of the more theosophical kind, as represented for instance by Ibn ‘Arabī and Suhrawardī of Aleppo, displays this eclecticism. Yet no definite answer has been given to the question how or why the main current of Moslem thinking came to be of that type of mixture in which ideas from Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Philo Judæus, the Catholic thinkers of the Christian Church, the Gnostics, and the Neoplatonists are brought into one harmonious whole and mingled together in such an extraordinary manner. Certain attempts have been made in studying individual thinkers of Islam to trace their systems back to their respective sources, for no one source can satisfactorily explain such a diversity of doctrines as we find in Moslem literature. This was done by scholars who studied, e.g. al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, and was done by myself in studying the mystical philosophy of Muhyid-Dln Ibn ‘Arabī. In each case the fundamental ideas of the Moslem thinker were traced to the special source or sources which were deemed to have influenced his thought.

One important question, however, has always been overlooked, whether it is possible that the Moslem thinkers were not themselves responsible for mixing together those irreconcilable elements of Greek philosophy with other ideas derived from the prevalent religions of the East. In other words, was the eclecticism of Moslem thought only a reappearance of another kind of eclecticism which existed long before ? Some of the aspects of this problem will be dealt with in this paper.

I

IT is well known that the Ṱabaqāt al-shu‘arā’ of Muḥammad b. Sallāam al-Jumahi is one of our most important source-books for the history of Arabic poetry and poetic theory; it is equally well known that the text as at present available is both deficient, because of lacunae in the manuscripts hitherto discovered and used, and otherwise unsatisfactory, on account of inadequate editing. Despite the very numerous emendations to Joseph Hell's edition (Leiden, 1916) proposed by several eminent scholars, the book still remains lamentably short of perfection; though there can be few texts in the whole of Arabic literature which it would be more desirable to have in good and proper shape.

It has now been my unusual fortune to study in Mr. Chester Beatty's library an exceedingly fine old copy of the Ṱabaqāt al-shu‘arā’, undated but certainly of the fourth/tenth century. This hitherto unknown manuscript not only supplies a great part of the major lacuna in Hell's text (p. 19), but also contains other extensive additions summing up to a considerable fraction of the whole work; it presents moreover a very reliable recension of the book, and its numerous variants will make it possible at last to establish a satisfactory edition.

In the present paper a collation is offered of all the passages contained in Hell's text for which new readings are provided by the Chester Beatty manu-script. It is hoped in a subsequent paper to publish the additional material for which that manuscript constitutes the sole authority. Scholars will be interested to note how remarkably this fresh evidence confirms many of the brilliant emendations proposed by the famous Arabists who have from time to time devoted themselves to the improvement of Hell's edition.

In the year 1292/1875 there was born to a mixed Kurdish-Arab family a child who was destined to play a prominent part in modern Arabic literature. He was named Ma'rūf and was the second of two children in the family.

No one can say with certainty who was Ma‘rūf’s father because he himself rarely spoke about his family. So far as I am aware, there is not a single reference to his father in his Dīwān. Ma‘rūf’s unwise reticence concerning his family helped his opponents to allege that he was an illegitimate child. The late Tāha ar-Rāwī, the Iraqi philologist, who associated with Ma'rūf for over a quarter of a century, asserted that he avoided answering questions concerning his parentage and, if pressed hard, he would answer briefly and change the subject. The investigations of genealogists led them to the conclusion that his father belonged to the Kurdish tribe of al-Jabbārah, which was acknowledged by all the Kurds as being of ‘Alid origin. If so, then it must have been originally an Arab tribe which migrated to non-Arab districts. His mother is said to have belonged to the tribe of al-Qarāgfūl, a branch of ammar which dwells in the plain regions of Iraq.

Rusāfī was brought up in his grandfather's house in the quarter of al-Qarāgūl in Baghdad. A small dark room was allotted to him, which made him inclined to solitude and meditation. In his childhood he was not seen to mix with other children. But his fondness for mechanical instruments led to an accident in which he lost one of his fingers.

IT is a commonplace that the New Testament never speaks of the ordination of bishops. Elders or presbyters with powers of administration and instruction were the only ordained ministers. The church at Jerusalem was in the care of “the apostles and the elders”. When St. Paul visited Ephesus, it was the elders (presbyters) whom he summoned and addressed. It is not a little strange that he should tell these elders that the Holy Ghost had made them “bishops” to feed the church of God. The natural inference (unless the word episcopus is used in a general sense of overseer) would be that the office of elder and bishop could be held by the same person. St. Paul left Titus in Crete with the express purpose of completing the organization of the church there by appointing elders. But here, too, the bishop and the elder seem to be one and the same if any meaning is to be given to γὰρ in v. 7. Again, 1 Peter v, 2, if the reading ἐπισκποῦντ∊ς be allowed to stand, points in the same direction; if it is to be omitted then the epistle recognizes no bishop but Jesus Christ, and then only in a verbal, not a real sense. Moreover, though there are presbyters in heaven, there are no bishops: at any rate the apocalyptist of Patmos saw none !

On the other hand St. Paul, in addressing the whole congregation of the faithful at Philippi, adds “together with the bishops and deacons”, making no mention of presbyters.

Mr. A. Chester Beatty has recently acquired a shigle leaf which comes from a fourteen-century MS. and is interesting in more than one respect. I am greatly indebted to him for permission to give an account of it here.

This isolated folio, measuring 13 × 18 cm. (Pis. 22–3), slightly damaged and torn at the edges, is the last leaf of a work entitled “ ThexTear of the Weeper” (Dam'at al-bākī). This information is supplied by the colophon, which also makes it clear that it was written by the well-known author, Ibn Fadlallah al-'Umarī, at Damascus in 745/1345. With the help of this leaf, it will be possible to identify any other Surviving MSS. and notes in the handwriting of Ibn Fadlallah. Furthermore, it constitutes a good palseographic specimerfof the hand of a cultured man of the mid-fourteenth century, writing not an official document but for his own enjoyment. The leaf is especially interesting for the fact that at the bottom, taking the place of a vignette, there figures an attractive miniature which, as will be seen, is contemporary with the colophon. The fragment sets various problems which deserve to be examined in a wider context.

We are informed by Ibn al-‘Imād that Shihāb al-Dīn ‘Umar b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234), the celebrated Ṣūfi and founder of the Suhrawardīya Order, “heard Traditions from a number (of scholars)”, and that he wrote “a Mashyakha in an attractive section (fijuz’inlaṭtīf)”. This Mashyakha was known to Ḥājjī Khalīfa,4 but no copy is noted by Brockelmann. Now it is always interesting to have the names of the teachers of famous men, more especially when such information rests on the authority of the celebrities themselves, and it is therefore a fortunate chance that a manuscript of Shihab al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī’s essay in autobiography has actually survived. What is more, this unique copy is in the autograph of an eminent scholar; the colophon is signed Muhammad b. Shukr al-Shāfi‘ī, and is dated 738/1337. To complete the good story, the recension mounts to the author himself, and the learned copyist has transcribed from his archetype a note of samā’ with al-Suhrawardī dated 620/1223 at Baghdad.

The author gives the names of fifteen of his teachers, together with the texts of a small number of Traditions heard by him from each; each Tradition is furnished with a full isnād; and in some instances the dates of the teacher's birth and death are provided. The list begins with Shihāb al-Dīn's uncle, Diyā’ al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Qāhir b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Suhrawardī, himself a well-known Ṣūfī scholar (d. 562/1168, see Brockelmann I 436, Suppl. I 780); significantly enough no mention is made of ‘Abd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī (d. 561/1167) who is commonly reported to have initiated al-Suhrawardī into Ṣūfism.

Only one Islamic metal vessel can be said with certainty to have been made at Mosul. This is the so-called Blacas Ewer in the British Museum which bears an Arabic inscription stating that it was engraved by ujā’ b. Man'a al-Mawṣilī at Mosul in the month of Rajab 629 (= May 1232).

One of the most bewildering problems in Muslim law concerns the classification and effect of various types of invalid marriage contract. As in a large number of other such problems, moreover, the conflicting views of the leading jurists and their followers, ancient and modern, are by no means confined to disputes between the recognized Sunni schools (the Hanafis, Malikis, Shafi‘is and Hanbalis), for within the Hanafi school itself the position is no less confu-sing. Some Hanafi jurists, for instance, make a clear distinction between marriage contracts which are irregular (fāsid) and those which are void (bātil), while others use the two words interchangeably. Again, those who make the distinction differ considerably as to which types of invalid marriage contract fall within each category, as to the juristic concepts on which their decision is based, and as to the legal effects involved. The present article represents an attempt to outline the development of Hanafi thought on this matter and thereby to clear up certain common misconceptions.

Abu Hanifa himself was relentlessly logical in his approach to this subject, although his logic led him to somewhat strange conclusions. Arguing from the premise that the constituent parts of most contracts are four in number, namely two “considerations” and two contracting parties, he held that if a divine prohibition made either consideration unlawful in nature or either party incompetent to act, then one of the constituent parts of the contract was lacking and the whole vitiated in its very essence: it was therefore void (bāṬil) and of no legal effect, just as though no agreement had been reached between the parties.

§ 1. Muhammad Nasawi, the biographer of the Khwarāzm-shah Jalāl al-dīn, several times refers to the story of Nuṣrat al-dīn Muhammad (*Mahmūd) b. *Bīshkīn. When in 614/1217 the atabek of Azarbayjan, Özbek, was expelled from Isfahan by the Khwārazm-shāh Muhammed, Özbek's vassal Nuţrat al-din led the army back to Azarbayjan and thus enabled his master to escape with a small detachment. In Miyāna Nuṣrat al-din was taken prisoner by the Khwarazmians and brought to Hamadan. Wishing to humiliate him and other distinguished prisoners, the Khwārazm-shāh ordered them to stand on their feet while he played polo on the hippodrome. One day the conqueror's interest was aroused by the pair of unusually large ear-rings which Nusrat was wearing. Nu๣rat explained (p. 18) that his grandfather was captured by Alp Arslan during his expedition into Georgia (possibly that of 456/1064). Later, Alp Arslan liberated the prisoners but ordered them (as his slaves) to wear ear-rings with his name.

MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN, a small town situated on one of the left tributaries of the Tigrīs, at 70 km. to the north-east of Āmid (Diyārbakr), owed its importance to its situation on a short road connecting Armenia (Mush) with Upper Mesopotamia. It is probable that the ancient capital of Armenia, Tigranocerta, built by Tigran II circa 80 B.C., stood in the immediate neighbourhood of MAYYĀFĀRIQĪN.

In Islamic times Mayyāfāriqīn had a historian, Ahmad b. Yusuf b. ‘All ibn al-Azraq al-Fāriql, who wrote shortly after 572/1176. The only two copies of this curious work belong to the British Museum. The detailed description of the work and the first systematic presentation of its contents belong to that accurate British historian H. F. Amedroz, who has so considerably increased our knowledge of the medieval Arabic sources for the Near East. Numerous passages from Ibn al-Azraq are quoted by Amedroz in the footnotes of his edition of Ibn al-Qalanisi (1908). In more recent years M. Canard has published six passages of the history of Mayyāfārīqīn relative to Sayf al-daula and Claude Cahen has summed up its rich information on the early Artuqids.

These preparatory works will greatly help the future editor of the Mayyāfārīqīn chronicle. His task will not be easy, for the two versions are defective and divergent, and the best plan will be to print them in parallel columns. The script of Or. 6310 is very cursive and devoid of dots; that of Or. 5803 is defaced towards the end. The scribes were negligent even in geographical and personal names. The grammar of the author (or of his copyists) is lax and may occupy the attention of some student of vulgar Arabic in Upper Mesopotamia.