ABSTRACT
Whatever their morphological properties, the presence in the ġāyat al-maṭlūb of modes unattested in Systematist texts such as ‘ukbarī, ramal, sāzkarī and ṣa‘īdī is hardly unexpected, and by no means problematic. But insofar as the perception of certain modes as local and hence in the grander scheme of things somewhat marginal presumes a simplistic model of relationships akin to one of centre and periphery, it raises again the fundamental and still unresolved issue of the consistency of that centre or, better, elite stratum, and the extent of its transregional dominance, for once we move from acknowledging the international currency of names to examining the entities they denote matters become far less clear-cut. It is true that in spite of the radical divergence in the accounts given by Ibn Kurr and Systematist theorists of the general physiognomy of modal structure it has been possible to show that in several instances the differences they portray are apparent rather than real, yet in others they cannot readily be explained away and, as Figure 7.1 shows, a crude stratification of the levels of correspondence suggested by the previous case-by-case comparisons shows that the remaining level of divergence is disturbingly high, with the modes in which there is a high degree of unanimity outnumbered by those in which there is not. The latter contain, further, a stubborn minority where similarities are not just partial but difficult or impossible to establish, and among them only two are outside the šadd and āwāz groups, with the result that the forms in which Ibn Kurr describes fully a third of these core categories would hardly have been recognized by al-Urmawī.
