The following page contains text affected by significant ghosting or ink bleed-through from the reverse side of the paper, though the primary text remains legible.

Preface.

For years, the manuscript of the volume published here, as well as a large portion of its continuations, lay in my desk. Circumstances, which are little suited to promoting literary activity in a larger context, have repeatedly forced me to delay; only the pressure exerted on me by dear friends prompted the beginning of the publication of materials, of whose imminent appearance I believed I could speak with premature confidence in the preface to "The Zāhirīs" original: "Zâhiriten"; referring to Goldziher's 1883 study on the Zāhirī school of Islamic jurisprudence (Leipzig, O. Schulze, 1883). The profound books by Robertson Smith William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), a Scottish philologist and archaeologist known for "Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia." and Wellhausen Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), a definitive German biblical scholar and orientalist whose work on early Islam was contemporary with Goldziher’s. on Arabic antiquity encountered my finished manuscript, in which—as easily happens when using the same sources—many sections contained points of agreement with those works. As far as was possible without dissolving the cohesion of the text, I have now set aside much of my own work, contenting myself with references to the aforementioned writers. Often, however, this would not have been feasible without disturbing the cohesion or requiring a complete reworking of the relevant sections.

In the "Muslim Studies" original: "Muhammedanischen Studien" beginning with this volume, I intend to unite a series of treatises on the history of the development Entwickelungsgeschichte|The study of how a religion or culture evolves over time of Islam. Some things that I [published] in earlier years from this circle of my studies in Hungarian and French—