Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Masʿūd  al-Dabbāgh al-Idrīsī al-Ḥasanī (1090–1132/1679–1719, in Fez) was an unusual mystic. He is treated in the prosopographical literature (see Muḥammad b. al-Ṭayyib al-Qādirī, Nashr al-mathānī li-ahl al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿashar wa-l-thānī, ed. Muḥammad Ḥajjī and Aḥmad Tawfīq, Rabat 1977–86, 3:245–6), but most of what we know about him comes from the lengthy book devoted to him by his disciple Aḥmad b. al-Mubārak al-Lamaṭī (d. 1156/1743; al-Qādirī, 4:40–2), al-Dhahab al-Ibrīz min kalām Sayyidī al-Ghawth ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dabbāgh (“Pure gold from the words …

Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Aḥmad b. ʿAmīra al-Ḍabbī was an Andalusī scholar well known as the author of Bughyat al-multamis fī taʾrīkh rijāl ahl al-Andalus, a biographical dictionary of scholars that complements Jadhwat al-muqtabis by al-Ḥumaydī (d. 488/1095). Al-Ḍabbī was born in Vélez (in the present-day province of Almería) in about 550/1155 and lived most of his life in Murcia. He died in that city when a wall fell on him in one of his vegetable gardens, in 599/1203. He came early to the world of knowledge: he was not yet ten when he attended lessons by Abū ʿAbdallāh b…

Mirzā Salāmat ʿAlī “ Dabīr” (1803–75) was an Indian poet born in Delhi, who was known especially for his marthiyas (elegies, threnodies) in Urdu. His father, Mirzā Ghulām Ḥusayn (1190–?/1776-?), who reportedly earned his living as a trader, belonged to a family of Shīʿī scholars who had migrated to Delhi from Shiraz and were related to the well-known poet Ahlī-yī Shīrāzī (d. 1942/1535 or 943/1536). Early in the nineteenth century, the family moved to Lucknow, where Salāmat ʿAlī studied the traditional subjects wit…

The Dabistān-i madhāhib (“School of religions”) is an encyclopaedic work in Persian, which was composed anonymously in mid-eleventh/seventeenth-century India. It describes and classifies various world religions—Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—and several related sects and esoteric groups active in early modern India, Iran, and Central Asia. Combining extensive textual knowledge, oral reports, and personal observations of the author, the Dabistān opens a unique window on the religious climate of the time. Scholars have deb…

Abū Zayd ʿUbaydallāh b. ʿUmar b. ʿĪsā al-Dabūsī (b. c. 367/978, d. 430/1039 or 432/1041, in Bukhara) was a Ḥanafī jurist best known for his theoretical work in explaining juristic disagreements (ʿilm al-khilāf) among the founding authorities of the Ḥanafī school and between the Ḥanafī school and the other major Sunnī law schools. His nisba, al-Dabūsī, is taken from the city of Dabūsiyya (also Dabūsa), located between Bukhara and Samarqand. Some biographers, including Ibn al-ʿImād (d. 1089/1679), give his name as ʿAbdallāh rather than ʿUbaydallāh. All biographical notices credit …

The Dābūyid dynasty of ispahbads (local princes) ruled over the northern Iranian province of Ṭabaristān until they were deposed in 144/761 by the ʿAbbāsids. Centred in Sārī, the reign of the Dābūyids coincided with the latter part of the Sāsānid’s reign (554–69) over neighbouring Iranian territory and that of the Umayyads (41–132/661–749) who were the first Muslim dynasty. There is a paucity of information on the beginnings of Dābūyid rule but what little information is available is provided primarily by the two local histories of Ṭabaristān by Ibn Isf…

Dadanitic is the name now given to a group of Ancient North Arabian (ANA) inscriptions centred on the oasis of Dadan (biblical Dedān, modern al-ʿUlā), in northwestern Arabia but with scattered examples elsewhere, principally around the nearby, rival oasis of Taymāʾ. Macdonald (Reflections, 33) showed that the previous division of these inscriptions into “Dedanite” and “Lihyanite” was based on a mistaken analysis of the script. The ANA scripts belong to the “South Semitic script family” (Macdonal…

Dāgh (lit., scar, stain, mark, sorrow) is the nom de plume (takhallus) of Navāb Mīrzā Khān Dihlavī, originally called Ibrāhīm, a pre-eminent modern Urdu poet. He was the son of Navāb Shams al-Dīn Khān of Jhirkā Firūzpūr—who belonged to the aristocratic Lohārū family, to which the great poet Ghālib (d. 1869) was also related by marriage—and Vazīr Begam (usually called Chhotʾī Begam). Navāb Mīrzā Khān was born in Chāndnī Chawk, Delhi, on 12 Dhū l-Ḥijja 1246/25 May 1831 (see his horoscope in Jalva-yi Dāgh, 9). In 1837, his father was hanged by the British and his property confisc…

Daghestan (Dāghistān) is a republic of the Russian Federation. Located in the northeastern Caucasus, it has an area of 50,300 square kilometres and borders Kalmykia and the Stavropol region in the north, Chechnya and Georgia in the west, Azerbaijan in the south, and the Caspian Sea in the east. Daghestan’s geography ranges from coastal plain to foothills to alpine areas. The population of 2,910,249 (2010 census) includes speakers of Turkic languages (Kumyks, 14.9 percent; Azeris, 4.5 percent; N…

Dahbīdiyya is the name (nisba) of a family which, in the historiography and hagiography of Central Asia, was applied to descendants of Jalāl al-Dīn Khvājagī al-Kāsānī, later called al-Dahbīdī, known also as Makhdūm-i Aʿẓam b. Jamāl al-Dīn (d. 949/1542). He was a well-known shaykh of the Naqshbandiyya ṭarīqa (Ar., lit., way, hence Ṣūfī order), a pupil of Muḥammad b. Burhān al-Dīn al-Samarqandī, better known as Muḥammad Qāḍī (d. 922/1516), who was, in his turn, a pupil of Khvāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār (d. 895/1490), the famous shaykh of the Naqshbandiyya (a widespread ṭarīqa whose eponymous…

The use of the word dahira in a religious context appears to be unique to the Ṣūfī turuuq (orders, from Ar. ṭuruq, pl. of ṭarīqa, lit., way) of Senegal. The Arabic word dāʾira has meanings involving mathematical concepts (e.g., ring, circuit, circumference) and administrative notions (e.g., district, bureau, agency) (Wehr, 347). In Morocco, for example, a dahira (local spelling) is a local police unit above the commissariat; in Algeria, a daïra (local spelling) is a district or “circle,” the second largest administrative unit, below the wilaya (wilāya, governorate). The connotati…

The Dahiratoul Moustarchidina wal Moustarchidaty (Ar., dāʾirat al-mustarshidīna wa-l-mustarshidāti, lit., the circle of those men and women who follow the straight path) is a Senegalese Islamic movement that originated in the Tijāniyya (a Ṣūfī order founded in Tlemcen, Algeria, in 1195/1781 by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Tījānī, d. 1815, who had a great influence on North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa). Created in the 1970s in Tivaouane (Wolof, Tiwawane), a city in western Senegal, near Thiès, and in the Tījānī zāwiya (Ṣūfī lodge) of the Sy family of marabouts, it was originally…

The Dahlak Islands are a group of 124 islands in the Red Sea, off the port of Massawa, in present-day Eritrea. Only four are inhabited; the main island is Dahlak al-Kabir. The islands have been known from ancient times for their marine life and pearl fishery. For the Christian kingdom of Aksumite Ethiopia (c. 100 to 940 C.E.), they served as a bridgehead for invasions of Arabia until they were occupied by the Muslims in 83/702. From then on they served instead as a bridgehead of Islam into the Hor…

Aḥmad b. Zaynī b. Aḥmad Daḥlān (d. 1304/1886) was a sayyid of the Ḥasanid line (that is, a descendant of the prophet Muḥammad through his grandson al-Ḥasan) and one of the most influential scholars in Mecca through the 1870s until his death. He was born in Mecca sometime between 1231/1816 and 1233/1818 and died in Medina. He completed his education in the jurisprudential tradition of the four schools of law ( madhhab, pl. madhāhib) in Sunnī Islam solely in Mecca, where he also made a career as a scholar of the Shāfiʿī school. A moderate Ṣūfī (mystic) in the style of …

Kyai Haji Ahmad Dahlan (1868–1923) was a Javanese religious official attached to the Yogyakarta sultanate, who founded the reformist Muhammadiyah movement in Yogyakarta in 1912. He was born in the kauman, the quarter for devout Muslims near the Great Mosque, in the royal city of the sultanate of Yogyakarta, into a family of the upper class of the sultanate’s religious apparatus. At birth he was given the name Muhammad Darwish. His father, Kyai Haji Abu Bakar bin Kyai Mas Sulaiman, was a religious scholar (Javanese kyai), who worked as a preacher (Jav. ketib) of the royal palace, and hi…

Iḥsān b. Muḥammad Daḥlān (1901–52), also known as Kyai Iḥsān Jampes, was a prominent Javanese Muslim scholar ( kyai) and a prolific writer, recognised especially for his Arabic writings on Ṣūfism. He was born in Jampes, Kediri, East Java. His father was also a Muslim scholar and the founder of the Jampes pesantren (Islamic boarding school). Iḥsān Daḥlān grew up in the pesantren milieu and began his education under the tutelage of his father. He then went on to study with a number of prominent Muslim scholars in different pesantrens in Java, including his uncle, Kyai Khazin of Pesant…

Dahrīs were thinkers in the early Islamic world whose cosmology left little or no room for God. Usually translated ‘materialists” or “eternalists,” the term has also been used in a generic sense for anyone, such as a modern scientist, who deems the universe to be explicable without reference to divine intervention. 1. The early Dahrīs The Dahrīs are first mentioned in Iraq in the 120s/740s. By profession they seem mostly to have been doctors, astrologers, alchemists, and others interested in the workings of the natural world. In intellectual style they were mutakallims. They specialis…

Dāʿī (s), in Ismāʿīlī Islam, were the agents of the daʿwa (the mission appealing for adherence and support), the earliest records of which date from about 261/875, in Iraq, concerning the activities of the Qarāmiṭa, led by Ḥamdān Qarmaṭ (d. 321/933) and his brother-in-law ʿAbdān (d. 286/899). It is likely, however, that the movement had already been in existence for some time. Somewhat later, we begin to find names of dāʿīs, many of whom were converted by a certain al-Ḥusayn al-Ahwāzī, who was apparently acting on instructions from a central headquarters in Salami…

The Dajjāl is a malevolent creature in human form, who appears at the end of the world as the apocalyptic opponent of Jesus. The Arabic word dajjāl (lit., “cheat, impostor”) is probably cognate with the Syriac dagalo (deceiver), which is used frequently for the Antichrist. The Dajjāl is not mentioned or alluded to in the Qurʾān but appears in apocalyptic works and canonical ḥadīth collections. The Dajjāl is usually said to be Jewish and to come from the eastern part of the Muslim world, either Isfahan or various other cities in Iraq, Fars, or Khurāsān. He i…

Sayyid Mīr ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Maʿṣūm ʿAlī Shāh Dakanī (b. c. 1147/1734–5, d. end twelfth/eighteenth century) was an Indian-born spiritual master of the Niʿmatallāhī Ṣūfī order who revived Niʿmatallāhī Ṣūfism in Persia in the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth century (the Niʿmatallāhiyya, historically influential in Central Asia and India but today mostly in Iran, with significant groups in the West, goes back to Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī, d. 843/1431, a Syrian-born Iranian mystic and author who settled in K…