Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition

Get access Subject: Middle East And Islamic Studies
Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs

Help us improve our service

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Second Edition) Online sets out the present state of our knowledge of the Islamic World. It is a unique and invaluable reference tool, an essential key to understanding the world of Islam, and the authoritative source not only for the religion, but also for the believers and the countries in which they live. 

Subscriptions: see Brill.com

Ṭāʿa

(964 words)

Author(s): Gimaret, D.
(a., pl. ṭāʿāt ), a term of the theological vocabulary for an act of obedience to God, contrasted with maʿṣiya , pl. maʿāṣī , act of disobedience to God, hence sin. The two terms represent respectively good and bad actions, but add, or substitute for, these purely moral ideas the religious concept of conformity or non-conformity to the divine Law. Ṭāʿa is not a Ḳurʾānic term (good actions are usually called ṣāliḥāt , or much more rarely, ḥasana , pl. ḥasanāt (see VI, 160; XI, 114; XXV, 70; XXVII, 89; XXVIII, 84). On the other hand, the verb aṭāʿa “…

Taʾabbaṭa S̲h̲arran

(1,445 words)

Author(s): Arazi, A.
, the nickname of the pre-Islamic ṣuʿlūk poet T̲h̲ābit b. Ḏj̲ābir b. Sufyān of the Banū Saʿd b. Fahm (of the group Ḳays ʿAylān, see Ibn Ḥabīb, Alḳāb , 307). The traditions which have attempted to explain this nickname (“he carried an evil under his arm") should not be taken at face value; the evil that was carried round by this very young man possessed a legendary significance, whether it concerned snakes, a sabre or a g̲h̲ūl [ q.v.]. This name was intended to convey a particular image of a poet dominated by an inborn tendency to cause nuisance as well as to suggest the p…

Taʿaddī

(449 words)

Author(s): Taha, Zeinab A.
(a., maṣdar of the form V verb), literally “act of going beyond, passing over ... to”, a term of Arabic grammar denoting transitivity; the related form taʿdiya is also found. The term is understood in terms of the syntactic effect of the transitive verb which goes beyond and passes over the agent to fall on the direct object (Levin, 1979). In that sense, the verb is considered an operator which governs the syntactic inflections of the agent and the direct object. Verbs such as kāna (“to be”), ẓanna (“to suppose”), which is a verb that introduces what were ori…

Taʿad̲j̲d̲j̲ub

(217 words)

Author(s): Gelder, G.J.H. van
(a.), lit. “amazement”, a term of rhetoric. Though sometimes given a separate place in lists of badīʿ [ q.v.], as in Rādūyānī’s [ q.v.] Tard̲j̲umān al-balāg̲h̲a or Ras̲h̲īd al-Dīn Waṭwāṭ’s [ q.v.] Ḥadāʾiḳ al-siḥr , it is far more often mentioned, in more general discussions of poetry, as one of the basic effects or aims of the poetic process, especially of imagery. It is found, together with its active counterpart taʿd̲j̲īb (“causing amazement”) in the Aristotelian tradition (Ibn Sīnā, Ḥāzim al-Ḳarṭād̲j̲annī [ q.vv.]) and, in a somewhat different sense, in the poetics of ʿAbd…

Taʿāʾis̲h̲a

(310 words)

Author(s): O’Fahey, R.S.
, one of a series of Arabic-speaking ethnic groups collectively called Baḳḳāra [ q.v.] “cattle people”, who live in the Sudan Republic across the southern Gezira, Kordofan [ q.v.], Dār Fūr [ q.v.] and eastern Chad. The Taʿāʾis̲h̲a tribal home is in the far southwest of Dār Fūr, neighbouring on the east the Habbāniyya, with whom they are closely linked. Little is known of the history of the Baḳḳāra; nor can much be said about how and when the present groupings emerged, although in Dār Fūr they were already in conflict with the sultanate to the north by the late 18th century. The Taʿāʾis̲h̲a rose …

Taʿalluḳ (a.), or more often Taʿalluḳa

(467 words)

Author(s): Gaborieau, M.
, literally “dependence, being related to, dependent on”, a revenue term of late Mug̲h̲al India, which meant a jurisdiction, a fiscal area from which a fixed amount of taxes was to be collected by a revenue ¶ official called taʿalluḳdār or taʿalluḳadār . The word taʿalluḳ with this meaning appeared in the second half of the 11th/17th century during the reign of Awrangzīb [ q.v.], in the context of increasing tax farming [see ḍarība. 6. c]; it was distinguished from the older ¶ Indo-Persian term zamīndārī , which included also feudal rights for the zamīndār [ q.v.] who was in charge of it, …

Ṭaʿām

(677 words)

Author(s): Gelder, G.J.H. van
(a.), food, nourishment. For foods and food habits, see g̲h̲id̲h̲āʾ ; for cookery and the culinary art, see ṭabk̲h̲ . The present article deals with the restricted topic of food etiquette. Since pre-Islamic times, the rules of food etiquette were divided between host and guests, the prime rules being that the former should be as generous as possible and the latter should not appear too greedy. Much may be learned from the numerous anecdotes on those who sinned against these rules: see the monographs and chapters in adab anthologies on misers ( buk̲h̲alāʾ ), especia…

Tāʾ and Ṭāʾ

(490 words)

Author(s): Blois, F.C. de
, the third and sixteenth letters of the Arabic alphabet, with the numerical values in the abd̲j̲ad system of 400 and 9 respectively. In the modern standard pronunciation, the former represents a voiceless, slightly aspirated, dental (or dento-alveolar) stop; the latter a voiceless, unaspirated, dental (dento-alveolar) stop with simultaneous velarisation, i.e. with the back of the tongue lifted towards the soft palate. Sībawayh and his successors classify ṭāʾ as mad̲j̲hūr , which most modern scholars have understood to mean "voiced" [see ḥurūf al-hid̲j̲āʾ and the references c…

Taʿarrub

(159 words)

Author(s): Bosworth, C.E.
(a.), the verbal noun of a denominative verb formed from ʿArab , pl. Aʿrāb , in the sense of “nomads, Bedouins” (the Ḳurʾānic sense of this latter term, cf. e.g. IX, 98/97, XLIX, 14; taʿarrub itself does not occur in the Ḳurʾān). In earliest Islam, taʿarraba and its synonym tabaddā denote the return to the Arabian desert after hid̲j̲ra [ q.v.] to the garrison towns ( amṣār [see miṣr . B]) and participation in the warfare to expand the Arab empire and the Abode of Islam. Some of this movement back to the desert was doubtless legitimate, but on occasion it was deno…

Taʿaṣṣub

(5 words)

[see ʿaṣabiyya ].

Taʿāwīd̲h̲ī

(6 words)

[see ibn al-taʿāwīd̲h̲ī ]. ¶

Taʿāwun

(1,718 words)

Author(s): Couland, J.
(a.), co-operation in all modern senses of the term; a noun of activity and sometimes an abstract noun, parallelled, in the latter case, by taʿāwuniyya (co-operativism). It was established in the early years of the 20th century as the term designating this field of meaning, by transference from the sense of mutual aid (still valid), with the adjective taʿāwunī (co-operative), the active participle mutaʿāwin (co-operator), then, later, the substantive taʿāwuniyya (co-operative, principally agricultural, but also organised on the basis of supply of goods, housing, …

Taʿawwud̲h̲

(345 words)

Author(s): Heinrichs, W.P.
(a.) means the use of the phrase aʿūd̲h̲u bi ’llāhi min ... “I take refuge with God against...”, followed by the mention of the thing that the utterer of the phrase fears or abhors. The term istiʿād̲h̲a “seeking refuge”, is often used as a synonym. The phrase, with variants, is well attested in the Ḳurʾān, in particular in the last two sūras which each consist of one extended taʿawwud̲h̲ [see al-muʿawwid̲h̲atān 1 ]. The litany-like enumeration of evil things in the first of the two foreshadows similar strains in a number of Prophetic invocations recorded in the Ḥadīth

Ṭabaḳa

(586 words)

Author(s): Levanoni, Amalia
(a., pls. ṭibāḳ or aṭbāḳ ), a term of Mamlūk military organisation. The ṭibāḳ were the barracks in the Cairo Citadel, Ḳalʿat al-Ḏj̲abal , where the Mamlūk sultans (648-922/1250-1517) had their Royal Mamlūks quartered and which also housed the military academies where newly-bought mamlūks received their training. We first learn of the ṭibāḳ during the reign of al-Ẓāhir Baybars who “established... barracks for the mamlūks which overlooked the great al-Dirka gate, and inside the al-Ḳarāfa gate he put up... a large building with small halls for the mamlūks’ quarters, and above them ba…

Ṭabaḳāt

(3,132 words)

Author(s): Gilliot, Cl.
(a.), pl. of ṭabaḳa, “everything which is related to another and which is similar or analagous to it, which comes to mean a layer of things of the same sort (Flügel, Classen , 269, n. 1). From this a transition can be made to the idea of a “rank, attributed to a group of characters who have played a role in history in one capacity or another, classed according to criteria determined by the religious, cultural, scientific or artistic order etc.” (Hafsi, i. 229; cf. al-Tahānawī, Kas̲h̲s̲h̲āf , 917), In biographical literature it is the “book of classes” of char…

Tabāla

(270 words)

Author(s): Smith, G.R.
, a town and wadi just within the northern boundaries of the ʿAsīr emirate of present-day Saudi Arabia, situated about 200 km/125 miles as the crow flies from the Red Sea coast line and less than 100 km/62 miles due west of Bīs̲h̲a (Zaki M.A. Farsi, National guide and atlas of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , map 34, G5). The town is an ancient one, and is mentioned in the literature on the Prophet. Al-Wāḳidī (ed. Marsden Jones, London, 1966, ii, 853-4 and iii, 981) twice mentions his raids against Ḵh̲at̲h̲ʿam in Tabāla in 8/629 and 9/630. It is stated in m…

Tabannin

(1,189 words)

Author(s): Chaumont, E.
(a.), adoption. This term— maṣdar or verbal noun of the form V verb derived from the biliteral root b n, which is also the source of ibn (“son”)—is used, just as in Western languages, in the literal sense (adoption of a child) and in the figurative sense (adoption of a doctrine, etc.). This article is concerned only with adoption in the literal sense. Since the Ḳurʾān (XXXIII, 5, 37; two verses from the Medinan period) is clear on this point, there is no disagreement among Muslim jurists of the different schools regarding the strict prohibition of plenary adoption. The occasion ( sabab

al-Ṭabarānī

(371 words)

Author(s): Fierro, Maribel
, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim Sulaymān b. Ayyūb b. Muṭayyir al-Lak̲h̲mī, one of the most important traditionists of his age (260-360/873-971). He is said to have begun his studies in ḥadīt̲h̲ at the age of 13, with his education spanning his native Syria, ʿIrāḳ, the Ḥid̲j̲āz, Yemen and Egypt, and he is said to have frequented several thousand masters in the course of a riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm which lasted for 33 years. Amongst these were Abū Zurʿa al-Dimas̲h̲ḳī, al-Ṭabarī and al-Nasāʾī [ q.v.]. He died at Iṣfahān, where he had lived for sixty years under the aegis of the governor Abū ʿAlī A…

al-Ṭabarī

(1,438 words)

Author(s): Thomas, D.
, ʿAlī b. Rabban, a 3rd/9th century convert from Christianity to Islam, who was known for his writings on medical topics and for two works in which he demonstrated the weaknesses of his former faith and the truth of the one he embraced. ʿAlī’s father’s name is recorded in a variety of ¶ forms. Ibn al-Ḳifṭī explains that the word read by various authors and their copyists as a name was really the Jewish title al-rabban, which was given to experts on the religious law, and that ʿAlī’s father was a distinguished Jewish scholar ( T. al-Ḥukamāʾ , Cairo 1326, 128, 155, repeated by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn a…

al-Ṭabarī

(1,465 words)

Author(s): Bauden, F.
, Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr Muḥibb al-Dīn Abū Ḏj̲aʿfar and Abu ’l-ʿAbbās, S̲h̲āfiʿī traditionist and jurist, b. 27 Ḏj̲umādā II 615/20 September 1218, d. 2 Ḏj̲umādā II 694/19 April 1295. Considered as the greatest scholar of his century in the Ḥid̲j̲āz, he was born into a family who had recently settled in Mecca and who were destined to become one of the most important buyūtāt . His great grandfather, Abū Bakr, had emigrated from Ṭabaristān to the Holy City in the seventies of the 6th/12th century. There he married and had se…
▲   Back to top   ▲