Les Trois Vies du Sultan Baibars: Choix de textes et presentation.

• Author: Irwin, Robert

This is a lavish, large-format, slip-cased book with many beautiful color reproductions. The quality of its print, paper, and color give a good deal of sensuous pleasure. The book celebrates "l'histoire magnifique d'Al-Malik Al-Zahir Baibars, heros historique et legendaire." Since the book has evidently been designed for perusal by Sunday historians and for display on their coffee tables, searching academic criticism of its text may not be appropriate. However even Sunday historians may be puzzled by some of the problems thrown up by Les trois vies du Sultan Baibars and students of Mamluk history should certainly be cautioned that the account given of the Sultan's life is not wholly reliable. After Jacqueline Sublet's introduction, the text falls into three parts: first, her translation of that section of Ibn Abd al-Ziihir's thirteenth-century biographical chronicle which deals with Baybars' rise to power; secondly, selections from Etienne Quatremere's early nineteenth-century translation from al-Maqrizi's fifteenth-century account oifference (IV:20-32). Such differences on the phonological level between the dialects will in the long run help us to classify the dialects and determine their development. Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour has an article in both volumes, both dealing with Makkan Arabic, "Closed syllable shortening and morphological levels" and "Epenthesis in Makkan Arabic: Unsyllabified consonants vs. degenerate syllables." In the first article she establishes the difference between general (katabt-a-ha) and postpausal (??a-ktub) epenthesis, on the one hand, and prepausal epenthesis of the type ??is-i-m, on the other. The former operates at the level where syllable structure is defined and depends on the presence of unsyllabified consonants, the latter is segmentally conditioned. Her conclusion is that the degenerate syllable analysis, which operates on a syllabically conditioned process does not apply in Makkan Arabic. In the second article, Abu-Mansour touches upon another difference between Arabic dialects, namely that between Egyptian nisiit/nisitha vs. Makkan Arabic nisiit/nisiitaha, which she analyzes as another consequence of the bimoraic constraint. In her view the shortening rule applies at an early stage of the derivation (in terms of morphological levels) in Makkan Arabic, but not in Egyptian Arabic. John J. McCarthy, "Semitic gutturals and distinctive feature theory," argues that in the Semitic languages gutturals...