I proceed to quote a few sentences of the beginning of the treatise in Tamil translation: for convenience's sake I abstain from using the elaborate Tamil characters. The Arabic preamble runs:—"Praise to Allah who created the creatures in order to know Him, and ordained them to follow His commands; prayer and greetings be on His apostle Muhammad the Prophet on whom His mercy be bestowed."
The Tamil translation runs thus:
ellā pugalum pugalciyum Allah Ta'ala ukku
padaippugalai padailtān tanai ariya wēndi
tanudaya mārkattūdu nadakkumpadi parīmānān
Allah udaya salamum awanudaya
tūdan ukku namudaya nabiyār Muhammad
rahmattānawidam.... awargalai kottiram awar
tōlanmār awarudaya ummatukku.... undāwalāgawum
Certain portions which were illegible to me (a Tamil Moslem, no doubt, would be able to read them) I have left vacant. In the same manner the translation runs, ever increasing in its inter- pretation of the Arabic sentences, so that gradually it developes into an ample commentary, fifteen folios, till there comes an ab- rupt ending. The last page of these fifteen folios is not covered with writing; on the page immediately following a Malay dog- matical tract of six folios begins. Next come some Tamil pages containing different dogmatical and legal items. and some niyyah- formulae and wedding-formulae, the Arabic prayers being indi- cated either by Tamil or by Malay titles, on one page even by a Persian one. So we find here the four great Moslem languages united: the sacred Arabic for the formulae, the old literary Per- sian, which once was the court language in Northern India, the far spread Malay, which is both the intermediary language of all Indonesian nations of the Moslem creed, and the islamised Tamil, the commercial idiom of the Dekhan.
The text further deals with the common dogmatical and mystical or divinatory subjects, which are usually to be found in so many Indian and Indonesian religious tracts. It would be ex- tremely tiresome to enumerate the contents of this varied manu- script in detail; it may suffice to point out the characteristic parts only. So we pass by in silence the Malay portions on dogmatics and the mystic circles (so-called dairahs) and on the different
