Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb.

• Author: Dallal, Ahmad

By Salem Ahmad Tairan. Texte und Studien zur Orientalistik, Bd. 8. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1992. Pp. 265. DM 49.80.

The book under review is the last (so far) in a series of limited Semitic onomastic presentations intended to spread the ideas of W. W. Muller, the supervisor of Tairan (whose professional training remains unknown). This disorganized, incomplete and partisan book on the old Sabaean personal names is filled with many biased and incorrect readings of texts, and statements that tend to distort the facts.

First, to justify his work, the writer claims that hitherto there were merely isolated interpretations of names (p. 4). This statement demonstrates his superficial knowledge of the literature listed in his bibliography. Against the writer's incomplete lists of both the forms (pp. 8-10) and the components of the names (pp. 257-64) stands, e.g., the complete presentation of all "elements entering into the composition of the proper names" of the largest collection of texts from Mahram Bilqis (1962). The writer also subscribes to (p. 6) J. Ryckmans' erroneous theory involving a mere half-dozen names, which are not even found in his nominal forms (p. 9), and no mention or consideration is given to my thorough rebuttal of that imaginary theory.(1) Further, he singles out (p. 6) his mentor's study of some names derived from the single root yt, which provides no solution or correction to any question!

Second, Tairan claims (p. 135) that the name "sbt" is attested in Ir "46" with reference to my Miscellanees ...,(2) "S. 79f." This reference is also off the mark because the name is wsbt in my study, p. 79, with reference to p. 9 where the division of Ir 46 into two texts is stated to be "demanded ... by the manifest difference in the letter height"; thus, the correct reference is Ir 46 b/1. Tairan's partisanship is evident again in his devoting space to the useless rehash of al-Iryani's reading error of sk instead of sb.

Third, Tairan refers the "name yqhyf" of Ga 100 to "Garbini, SACWY, S. 36" (p. 252). This reference is erroneous because G. Garbini reads the text as follows: "y q h May he have success yf Yf."(3) The reading of the text as the single name yqhyf comes from my study of that collection, which is referred to by Tairan in the second place as if it merely corroborated Garbini's reading!

The writer's approach is to provide nominal forms for which parallels are sought in other Semitic languages, preferably Arabic, in which case...