The region of Najd in Central Arabia has always been regarded as inaccessible, ringed by a belt of sand deserts, the Nafūd, Dahana and the Rub’ al-Khāli and often with its population at odds with the rulers of the outer settled lands. It is however the centre of a purely Arabian culture based on a partnership between bedouin camel husbandry and settled palm cultivation. Possibly as a result of overpopulation the bedouin have periodically spread over into the lands of the Fertile Crescent. Because of their isolated position the Najdi dialect is of a very interesting and archaic type showing very little non-Arabic influence, which has led to the reputation of the Arabian bedouin as preservers of the original Classical form and considerable prestige being attached to the Najdi type. Consequently the region is a powerhouse of dialect influence so that Najdi based dialects are spoken all along the Gulf Coast and throughout most of the Syrian Desert. Interest in these dialects has led to a number of recent studies of their oral literature and of the morphology and phonology. Ingham's work concentrates on the grammatical system, syntax and usage and is based on a number of trips to the region over the last fifteen years. The data base includes bedouin oral narrative, ordinary conversation and radio plays.

This is an absorbing and authentic account, first published in 1986, of the history and traditional way of life of the Al-Dhafir bedouins of north-eastern Arabia, based on a study of their traditions, Arabic historical annals and the reports of western travellers over the past two hundred years. During the early part of the twentieth century the Al-Dhafir were a major power in the desert south west of the Euphrates between Samawa and Zubair. Beginning in the Hijaz in the early 1600s as a confederation of small tribes under the leadership of the Suwait clan, they have had an eventful history in which their tribal tradition records battles with the Sharifs in the Hijaz, the al’Urai’ir in al Hasa, the Muntafiq in Iraq and finally the Ikhwan raiders in the 1920s. They are well known for an almost quixotic adherence to the taditions of hospitality and protection of fugitives for which their sheikhs became known as the Ahl al-Buwait, ‘people of the little tent’.

Uganda developed as a British protectorate in a manner which made it virtually impossible for any indigenous politician to emerge as the unchallenged leader of his country. Obote: A Political Biography describes the efforts of one man to find a pragmatic solution to that problem, and in doing so to create a united, democratic Uganda. Kenneth Ingham makes the first attempt to trace the political career of Obote through the ups and downs of his two presidencies and his time in exile during the military dictatorship of Idi Amin. The book challenges accusations of tyranny and argues that Obote's political achievements have been underestimated. It addresses the key issue of why a country so well endowed with human and material resources should have suffered so grievously from shortages and internal strife. Obote's contribution emerges as unique and at the same time representative of the problems facing the leaders of Africa's emergent nations.

This dictionary of 12,000 entries aims to preserve Indian culture and at all points illustrate the use of words in examples, especially syntactic words, whose usage cannot be captured purely by giving an English equivalent. It provides depth as regards the usage of frequently occurring items and especially in the use of syntactic elements and usage in context.

Gerald de Gaury served in Iraq and Kuwait from 1924 to 1941 as army officer, political agent and chargé d'affaires to the Iraq Regent. His writings on Arabia are well known, but this previously unpublished piece dating from 1932 is on a subject not usually associated with him, namely the Arabian Bedouin. It concerns the Iraqi branch of the 'Anizah, probably the most numerous of Bedouin tribes, so numerous that the Bedouin saying runs "Any enemy, but not the 'Anizah". The 'Amarat are less well documented than their Syrian cousins, the Rwalah. So it is interesting to see this "Review", which contains details of tribal divisions, sheikhly pedigrees, wells and grazing grounds, economic life, customs and language. The name of the Hadhdhal, the sheikhly line of the 'Amarat, is a name with a long history and still much respected in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

This book contains a detailed grammatical description of Jibbali (or Shahri), an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with seventy texts. This is the first ever comprehensive grammar of Jibbali, and the first collection of texts published in over a hundred years. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts include those collected by the late T. M. Johnstone (newly edited and translated), as well as new texts collected by the author, while the grammar is based both on the texts and on original fieldwork. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.

In Coastal Dhofari Arabic: A Sketch Grammar, Richard Davey provides a detailed account of the Phonology, Morphology and Syntax of a hitherto neglected Arabic dialect found in southern Oman. It is a timely account of a dialect that is endangered due to development, modernisation, and the resulting social changes in Dhofar.

Considers how the languages of dress in the region connect with other social practices, and with political and religious conformity in particular. Treating cases as diverse as practices of veiling in Oman and dress reform laws in Turkey, these ethnographic studies extend from Malta to the ME and Caucasus.