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.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the general upsurge of nationalism in Europe exerted an influence on the Jewish population as well. This influence was particularly strong in Eastern Europe, where there occurred a formidable Jewish nationalistic renaissance, some features of which were: the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language; the widespread use of Jewish folk-lore in the works of Jewish writers, painters, and musicians; and the rebuilding and resettling of Palestine by small groups of Jewish pioneers. The new settlers in Palestine soon adapted Hebrew (which had indeed remained very much alive through the centuries as a literary tongue) to the requirements of daily existence, and it became the language of instruction in most of their schools. At present, practically the entire Israeli population (about two million) speaks Hebrew.

The editions of Sanskrit dramas based entirely on manuscripts written in the local vernacular script, called Ārya Euttu, present interesting subjects for linguistic study. The Prakrit of many of these dramas, and especially the dramas wrongly assigned to Bhāsa, has been examined by various scholars, and the general conclusions derived thence have been utilized as one of the arguments in support of the Bhāsa-theory. But careful study of the original texts and the printed edition of them shows that in transforming the original Malayali script into Devanagari print some liberties have been taken by the local editors, including Mm. Dr. T. Ganapati Sastri, the late lamented editor of the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series. The first thing that arrests the attention of the student who examines the manuscripts is the presence of small circles written by the side of the letters, as for instance in: MUHUoTÅ, EoVĀ, etc. The general principle that has guided the editors has been to double the consonant following the small circle, when it stands by the side of the letter, and to treat it as an anusvāra when it stands above the letter. This procedure of giving two different values to the same symbol is, however, very much open to question.

THE early history of Central Asia, the background of the Turkish expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the Mongol eruption in the thirteenth, presents a large number of problems which the slowly progressing study of documents made accessible to us in particular by the late M. Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot is bringing nearer to solution. Among these documents those from the kingdoms of Khotan and Krorayina are of outstanding importance for the early period. It seems desirable to treat of some of these problems here.

1. The vocabulary of Khotan and the Iranian words in the Krorayina documents

A large part of the vocabulary of the Khotanese language is now known, much of it already accessible in print, and it is possible to confront it with the Iranian words found in Krorayina. It is at once noticeable that in the two vocabularies, while part is identical, as in lāstana- ‘quarrel’, corresponding to Krorayina lastana, or prahona- ‘garment’ to Krorayina prahuni, yet marked differences appear which are unlikely to be due only to difference of time.

I would notice here the following ten cases.

1. In an article Recent Work in ‘Tokharian’ (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1947, 149–150), I called attention to the difference between Krorayina guśura, Kuchean Sanskrit gauśura, and the Khotan *bisīviraa-, attested in the plural bīsīvīrā of high birth ‘(Suvarnabhāsa-sūtra, Khotanese Texts I p. 248, 73 r 1), and the related bäsīvärāssai, translating Sanskrit kulaputra, a person of good family. The treatment of the initial υ- shows that here two dialects are concerned.

Svetadvipa, “The White Island,” is the name of an island, situated in the far North, inhabited by Nārāyana and by pious White Men, who worship him. The description of their worship, which can be read in that part of the Śāntiparvan, the twelfth of the Mahābhārata books, devoted to Nārāyana is distinguishable to an obvious degree from the stories of other cults found in the Brahminical literature, and has led researchers of both earlier and more recent date to try certain more or less successful interpretations. The attempt at solving the problem of Śvetadvīpa, which has, during more recent times, attracted the greatest attention, is that of Garbe.

Corresponding to Av. anra-, angra-, the Pahlavi has the word (occurring also with the doubledotted ). Numerous explanations had already been proposed when Bartholomae, Zur Kenntnis der mitteliranischen Mundarten, i, 1916, 18 ff., discussed the word more fully than had till then been done. He concluded that the Pāzand ganā was ùntrustworthy, rejected Spiegel's explanation of gan- as equivalent to zan-, equally Darmesteter's zanāk, his own earlier reading zūrāk, and Andreas's druvāk, to suggest a new interpretation dawāk ‘deceiving’.

Having been in the first instance a classical scholar, Wilfred Whiteley well knew how important vernacular texts are for an understanding of a people's thought and values. He was also that rare combination of anthropologist and linguist and saw therefore in texts much more than phonetic, grammatical, lexicographical, and other purely linguistic problems, but also the semantic, which in effect means ethnographical, questions raised by them. He saw clearly that a people's whole way of life, and the way they see it, may be revealed in a single text. Consequently, and apart from their significance for the ethnographer who recorded vernacular texts among (generally) a pre-literate people, they can be, especially if presented in both vernacular and with a competent translation, of considerable pedagogic value, the student asking himself such questions as arise from their content.

The frequent Vedic construction exemplified by ṚV 5, 31, 4 indram … arkaír évardhayann éhaye héntav u ‘they strengthened Indra with hymns to slay the serpent’ has since Delbriick's days been the subject of some discussion and difference of opinion. Whitney expressed the view that the frequent use of the dative beside a so-called infinitive dative to denote the subject or the object of the action constitutes a case of attraction: in the above sentence one would, in accordance with the implication of this term, expect the accusative ahint, whereas in ṚV 1, 24, 8 cakira sryāya pánthām ánvetav u ‘he made a track for the sun to follow’, the dative of the noun denoting the being on whose behalf the path is made is understandable at first sight. Hence no doubt the comment made by Whitney before quoting the latter line: the construction is in part a perfectly simple one, but is stretched beyond its natural boundaries by a kind of attraction.

On 3 January 1868, when an Imperial decree announced the Emperor's intention of resuming direct responsibility for the administration of Japan, those who had done most to bring this about had no detailed plans for the future of their country's governmental structure. In fact it was not until 15 August 1869 that the new system took anything like a stable shape. In the interval Japan's leaders worked largely by trial and error, partly in a search for a form of government which would meet their needs, partly in accordance with the dictates of political necessity, the final result being to place both power and office in the hands of what is often called the Meiji oligarchy: a handful of Court nobles (kuge) of relatively low rank and a slightly larger group of former samurai from the fiefs of Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Hizen.

The dynasty which ruled the khānate of Bukhara during the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed descent from Chingiz Khān's son Jochi, as did the Shaybānids of the preceding dynasty. It is known as Ashtarkhānid, to recall the place of origin of the family, viz. Astrakhan. More often it is referred to as Jānid, after Jānāī Muḥammad Khān, who is considered by some as the first ruler of the dynasty. But it will be seen that there is no clear basis for such an assumption, and that in fact his father and his eldest son were between them the founders of the dynasty

In a paper contributed to the Bhandarkar Commemoration Volume in 1917, Professor S. K. Belvalkar announced the discovery of a new commentary on the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Māṭhara, and identified it with the lost Sanskrit original of the commentary on that work preserved in the Chinese translation of Paramārtha (c. a.d. 550). Commenting on this suggestion in 1918, I observed that derivation of the newly discovered commentary and of Paramārtha from the same source was an alternative possibility. Professor Belvalkar has now, in a paper which was written to form part of the collection presented to Professor Hillebrandt on his 70th birthday, and is pxiblished in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Institue, adduced reasons in support of his original suggestion.

The India Office Library MS Ch ii 003 contains 73 folios of a medical text written alternatingly in Sanskrit and Khotanese. The folios are numbered from 44 to 116. Although the text ends in the middle of a Sanskrit recipe, the beginning of the text has survived. As no title and no colophon are extant and as the text has not been traced elsewhere H. W. Bailey assigned the text the convenient label Jwaka-pustaka ‘The Book of Jivaka’. The text begins as an exposition made by the Bhagavant to the famous physician Jīvaka, called elsewhere in Khotanese ‘the king of physicians’.