Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

A fable is a short and often humorous tale in which non-human characters (often animals, but also plants or supernatural creatures; rarely human beings) act and speak as human beings in order to exemplify a simple common truth in a metaphorical manner. 1. Introduction In international comparative literature studies, the fable as a literary genre has largely been defined against the backdrop of its Graeco-Roman history (Wienert; Rodríguez Adrados) and its further development in the European Middle Ages and Enlightenment periods (Dicke and …

Many of the animal fables in the two major literary traditions of Muslim Southeast Asia —Malay and Javanese—are translations and/or adaptations from foreign sources, primarily Arabic, Persian, and Indian, and, in the modern period, European. These works belong to the genre of edifying literature, designed to regulate the behaviour of Muslims (Braginsky, 340–1). They generally consist of collections of relatively short stories with animal characters endowed with human qualities, intended to teach moral lessons…

Following the lead of Aristotle, the Islamic philosophers generally organise their discussions of animal and human psychology around the notion of the faculties (or powers) of the soul (quwwāt al-nafs). Aristotle’s faculty psychology was itself a reaction to Plato’s earlier tripartite division of the soul in Book IV of the Republic. A few Islamic authors appealed to Plato’s tripartite soul, but the majority accepted the Aristotelian framework and criticised the Platonic alternative. Most adherents to the Platonic tripartite soul invoke it in the context of their eth…

Faḍāʾil (sing. faḍīla; (moral) excellence, an excellent quality, or exquisiteness) denotes the superior qualities of individuals and groups, places and regions, or actions and objects. From the second/eighth century onwards, “faḍāʾil” came to denote a distinct genre of monographic works with material predominantly based on the Qurʾān and ḥadīth. The term also denotes sections and chapters in other genres of writing, including ḥadīth collections and historical, biographical, or geographical literature, where it has been extended to denote superior qualities…

Fadak was an agricultural village in the northern Ḥijāz somewhere near Khaybar, which is about one hundred fifty kilometres from Medina. Fadak was the centre of a long-running dispute between the reigning caliphs and the family of the prophet Muḥammad, which continued through the first three Islamic centuries. After this period, Fadak recedes from view and by the ninth/fifteenth century it was possible for two experts on Ḥijāzī geography—al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415) and al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506)—t…

Faḍal Shāh (1828–90) was born in Nawāṇkot’—then a village about two kilometres south of Lahore—into a Sayyid family with a tradition of learning but of reduced material circumstances. He lived his entire life in Nawāṇkot’, where he was employed as a clerk in the finance department of the Panjāb government. Faḍal Shāh’s successful career as a Panjābī poet, launched at an early age, was facilitated by the concurrent development of Lahore as a major publishing centre, following the British conquest of Panjāb in the 1840s. His first published works include Bārāṇ māh (“The twelve months”),…

Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Iṣfahānī (d. 1137/1724–5), known as al-Fāḍil al-Hindī, was an Uṣūlī (rationalist) Twelver Shīʿī jurist or mujtahid known for his vast and authoritative legal knowledge. He lived during a time when rationalists were under attack by the Akhbārī (traditionist) jurists who dominated Ṣafavid Isfahan. It is reported that he completed the study of the manqūlāt (transmitted—i.e., scriptural—Islamic sciences) and the maʿqūlāt (rational sciences) by the age of thirteen. He spent part of his childhood and early adulthood in India, w…

Muḥammad b. Faḍlallāh al-Burhānpūrī (firstly known as al-Jawnpūrī) (c. 952–1029/1545–1620) was one of several mystics from north India who studied and taught in Mecca and Medina during the second half of the tenth/sixteenth century. He is mentioned in various biographical dictionaries, some in print, others only in manuscript, among them Nuzhat al-khawāṭir (“The delight of thoughts”) and Khulāṣat al-āthār (“The essence of the Traditions”); in the former, he is said to be a descendant of Abū Bakr. He was raised in Jawnpur (a centre of mystical learning), but the nisba by which he is …

The Banū Faḍlawayh were the leading family of the Shabānkāra, whose eponymous founder, Faḍlawayh (also Faḍlūn), temporarily seized control of Fārs in the middle of the eleventh century. Little is known of the nomadic Shabānkārids prior to 430/1038–9, when they were driven from Isfahan by the Ghaznavid incursion into Persian Iraq. The Shabānkārids initially fled south into Fārs, but they were met with hostility by the Būyid prince, Abū Kālījār (d. 440/1048), and forced to settle in the region of Dā…

Abū Nuʿaym al-Mulāʾī al-Faḍl b. Dukayn was a Kufan traditionist. He was reportedly born in 129/746–7 or late in 130/mid-748 and died late in 218/833–4 or perhaps at the end of Shaʿbān or in Ramaḍān 219/September-October 834. He was a client to the family of Ṭalḥa b. ʿUbaydallāh (d. 36/656). He was cross-eyed or had some other visual defect, for which he was nicknamed al-Aḥwal. His name of affiliation (nisba) al-Mulāʾī refers to his partnership with another Kufan traditionist, ʿAbd al-Salām b. Ḥarb (d. 187/803), in a shop selling wraps of some sort ( mulāʾ). Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn (d. 233/848) i…

Abū Khalīfa al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥubāb b. Muḥammad b. Shuʿayb al-Jumaḥī (206–305/821–917) was a well-known ḥadīth scholar and littérateur from Basra. He was renowned for his sense of humour and self-deprecation, and his company was often sought by governors and scholars, especially over meals. He loved poetry and is frequently cited in mediaeval books as having recited or transmitted many lines of poetry by pre-Islamic and early Islamic poets. He also developed and was known for speaking in rhymed prose (sajaʿ). According to some sources, al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥubāb was blind, but he pro…

Al-Faḍl b. Marwān (b. c. 160/777, d. 250/864) was an ʿAbbāsid courtier and diplomat. Dominique Sourdel has assessed the information available in the Arabic sources: the central references are found in al-Ṭabarī’s Taʾrīkh, with further details provided by the Taʾrīkh of al-Yaʿqūbī and other historiographic works and by select adab texts, notably al-Tanūkhī’s Nishwār al-muḥādara, the source of key remarks. Al-Faḍl’s career is to be set against the backdrop of two interrelated developments: the expansion of the ʿAbbāsid imperial state, in which the employme…

Al-Faḍl b. al-Rabīʿ (b. 138/757–8) was a prominent and skilled court intriguer during the reigns of the caliphs al-Hādī (169–70/785–6), al-Rashīd (170–93/786–809), and al-Amīn (193–8/809–13). He held the position of ḥājib (chamberlain) and thus exercised considerable control over access to the caliph and the caliph’s access to information. He also acted as wazīr for al-Amīn. He rose to power under the auspices of his father, who had been ḥājib before him. His father is reported to have risen from humble circumstances to great power. Al-Faḍl was well positioned w…

Al-Faḍl b. Sahl b. Zādhānfarrūkh (b. c. 154/771, d. 202/817–8) was an important ʿAbbāsid administrator ( kātib, wazīr, and amīr). He served as mentor to ʿAbdallāh al-Maʾmūn, the son of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809), and then as al-Maʾmūn’s advisor, secretary, governor general in the east, and head of his civil and military administration (al-Maʾmūn was to reign as caliph 198–218/813–33). Because al-Faḍl’s brother, al-Ḥasan b. Sahl (d. 236/850–1), worked for al-Maʾmūn in Baghdad since the fourth ci…

Abū Muḥammad al-Faḍl b. Shādhān b. Khalīl al-Azdī al-Naysābūrī  (d. 260/ 873–4), a traditionist, jurisprudent, and theologian, is regarded in the Imāmī Shīʿī tradition as one of the leading Imāmī scholars of his time. Nothing certain is known about his early life. His name suggests that his origins were in Nīshāpūr and that he was of Arab stock, from the tribe of Azd. He appears to have travelled as a young man with his father to Baghdad, where, according to a report from him, he studied Qurʾān recitation and then moved to Kufa, where he studied ḥadīth with al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Faḍḍāl (d. 2…

Faḍl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (1797–1861) belonged to the functional elite in British India, hailing from Khairabad (Khayrābād), a famous qaṣba (garrison town) in Awadh, about eighty kilometres northwest of Lucknow, the residence of many public officers in the British service. Khairabad was attractive for the elite’s investment because of its many Hindu temples, mosques, shrines, markets, and manufacturers, but, after the 1857 revolt was crushed, it became the objective of colonial encroachment (on Khairabad, see Husain 1979; Khayrābādī, Dār al-khayr; ʿAllāmī, 2:93, 176, 278; Ne…

Faḍl-i Imām b. Muḥammad Arshad b. Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ b. ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Ḥanafī Khayrābādī (d. 1827–8) was a leading scholar of the rationalist disciplines (maʿqūlāt), such as philosophy, logic, and philosophical theology, in late-twelfth/eighteenth and early-thirteenth/nineteenth-century India. In the immediately preceding generations, his family traced itself to Hargām, in North India, though Khayrābādī himself was born and raised in the town of Khayrābād, in Uttar Pradesh, India. There he was trained by the scholar ʿAb…

Faḍlī (Fażlī) Namangānī (also Faḍlī/Fażlī Farghānī) was the pen name of ʿAbd al-Karīm Namangānī, a poet and historian who lived in the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, in Namangān and Khoqand, in present-day Uzbekistan. In Khoqand he belonged to the literary circle around ʿUmar Khān (r. 1810–22), where he was given the title of malik al-shuʿarā (poet laureate). In 1821, on the khān’s behalf, he wrote Majmūʿa-yi shuʿarā (“Collection of poets”; other versions bear the titles Majmūʿa-yi shāʿirān, Majmūʿa-yi shuʿarā-yi Faḍlī, and Majmūʿa…

Faḍl (d. c. 257/871) was an ʿAbbāsid-era poet and courtesan. Typically referred to as Faḍl al-Shāʿira (“the Poetess”), she belonged to a select group of elite female performers—poets, singers, musicians, and dancers—of slave background, trained in the appropriate social and literary arts and linked closely to the highest circles of imperial court society. The key source on the early ʿAbbāsid courtesans is Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-aghānī; it contains a section on Faḍl’s repertoire and career and another on her relationships with Saʿīd b. Ḥumayd (d. af…

1. Personal history Born in Riyadh in 1921, Fahd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was the eighth son of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (Ibn Suʿūd, r. 1932–53). His mother was the influential Ḥassa bt. Aḥmad al-Sudayrī (1900–69), who gave the founder seven sons—Fahd, Sulṭān (1925–2011), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (1931–2017), Turkī (1934–2016), Nāyif (1934–2012), Salmān (1935-), and Aḥmad (1942–)—better known as the “Sudayrī Seven.” Educated at the Princes’ School in Riyadh, Fahd was tutored by several prominent Wahhābī scholars, inc…