North Africa in search of Mss. and material for my work. The first tour was during June - September 1968, and the second was during November - December 1969. Being myself an Ibadhi, it was easier for me to obtain access to private libraries and collections of Mss. than for non-Ibadhis. To my surprise, most of the important Maghribi works, including those which were thought to be lost, were still extant and in good condition. Moreover, there is still great hope for future discovery in this field. A description of some of the new Mss. discovered on my first tour has been published in the Journal of Semitic Studies. It is hoped that a complete list with a full description of all the Mss. I have examined will be made in the near future.

The region, which has not yet been fully explored and is no doubt a place where even more valuable Ibadhi Mss. are likely to be found, is Oman, which requires special attention from students of Ibadhi matters. I myself was unable to visit Oman, but was provided by some early works on jurisprudence and standard Sirahs of early Ibadhi authorities which were of great help in the study on the origins of the Ibadhi school and its relations to the early opposition movements in Islam.

Oman, being a major center of the Ibadhis and the Ibadhi imamate, received close attention from European scholars, an account of which has already been given by J. Wilkinson in his D. Phil. thesis on The Arab Settlement in Oman, Oxford, 1969, and which I therefore do not propose to treat here. However, what seems still to be needed as far as Oman is concerned, though it would not be easy to achieve, is the discovery of more material which would undoubtedly help in forming a clear picture of the Ibadhi school and its development in all Ibadhi areas. For, most of the early Ibadhi authorities moved from Basra to Oman, where strong Imamate was founded and which provided a more congenial atmosphere for those scholars to develop their views and contribute to other Ibadhi countries, but the original material of the Ibadhi doctrine in its early period may well be preserved in Oman, and the likelihood of making important findings there is quite feasible.

European scholars also paid close attention to the Ibadhis of North Africa. Masqueray, who translated the Sirah of Abu Zakariya al-Warijlani into French, started their studies. His work attracted the attention of other scholars who contributed to Ibadhi studies in different fields. In the field of history, Motylinski, in his article on the Ibadhi books, presented full tables of contents of the Ibadhi works on the biographies of the Ibadhi Sheikhs; the Sirah of Abu Zakariya; the Tabaqat of al-Darjini; al-Jawahir of al-Barradi, and the Siyar of al-Shamaakhi. He later edited and translated into French the history of Ibn al-Saghir al-Maliki on the Rustamid Imams. Full reviews of these Ibadhi sources appeared later. Lewicki made reviews of both Tabaqat of al-Darjini, and the