The Educated African: A Country-by-Country Survey of Educational Development in Africa, Compiled by Ruth Sloan Associates

and V. V. Matveev and published in i960. The book is divided into two sections. The first section contains excerpts from works by ' representative Arab writers on historiography and descriptive geography', nineteen authors in all, including such familiar names as Baladhuri, Tabarl, Istakhri, Ibn Khurdadbih, al-Ya'qubi, Ibn Qutayba, and Mas'Gdi. There are also bits by lesser authors, including the Christian chroniclers Sa'ld ibn alBatrlq and Agapius of Manbij, and the Persian traveller Bu2urg ibn Shahriyar of Ramhurmuz, to list only three. There is an extract from the Rasd'il of the Ikhwan al-Safa'. The second section, much shorter, contains extracts from four authors on ' mathematical geography ', al-Khwarizmi, Farghanl, al-Battani, Ibn Sarapion (Suhrab); the whole is rounded off with a bibliography, a list of abbreviations of periodicals cited, complete indexes, and a glossary of Arabic terms encountered in the texts. A random comparison of two of the extracts in this volume, those from Ibn al-Faqlh al-Hamadhani's Kitdb al-Bulddn, and al-Hamdani's Sifa jazirat al-'Arab, with the original printed texts reveals that a certain number of typographical errors have found their way into the book of Kubbel and Matveev. Most of these have been corrected by an extensive list of printer's errors at the end of the volume, but a few remain. In the extract from the Kitdb al-Bulddn (p. 49, line 9) read al-thawr rva al-thawr; on the same page, line 13, there should be a waw after the word Waq Waq and before ward', and in the next line a warn has been omitted before the word khalf. On p. 53, the 6 in the margin should read 9. The type face used in the Arabic texts is old and worn and there are a good many diacritical points missing, particularly on the letters fa" and qdf, to the extent that inexperienced students may have trouble in reading the text in places. If further volumes in this series are to be produced in which Arabic type is to be employed, this antiquated font should be discarded and replaced by a better one. The value of this book lies in its cheapness and in the fact that it brings together interesting pieces of many inaccessible texts dealing with Africa. But one might justifiably quarrel with the choice of the compilers: in one place, considerable space is given to India and China (pp. 56-58), which seems rather inappropriate in a book on Arabic sources for Africa south of the Sahara. In another place (p. 137), an interesting description of the Island of Socotra (Suqutrd'), in so many ways a part of Africa (see pp. 52-53 of Miiller's edition of HamdanI), has been omitted. In the extract from the Rasd'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (Letter Five), the emphasis is rather on the division of the seven climes and their limits than specifically African material. Although the selections provided in this book are interesting—for Arabic geographical literature is invariably interesting—they do not always seem relevant In that respect, this book is a disappointment. Yet it will be useful to readers of Arabic as well as Russian, and as far as this reviewer can judge, the Russian translations of the Arabic texts are quite adequate. B. G. MARTIN