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…

Fahri (Fakhrī), whose full name was Fahreddin Yakub b. Muhammed (Fakhreddīn Yaʿqūb b. Muḥammed) was born in the Turkish emirate of Aydın, on the Aegean coast. He was court poet to Fahreddin İsa Bey (Fakhreddīn ʿĪsā Beg), the reigning Aydınoğlu (Aydınoghlu), who favoured him with the right to derive his pen name from his own honorific. İsa Bey was interested in Arabic and Persian and commissioned Fahri to compose for himself and his courtiers a long Turkish mesnevi (methnevī) based on Khusraw u Shīrīn, the Persian mathnawī by Niẓāmī (d. 12 March 1209), which was completed in 576/1180. Fahri c…

Fahri of Bursa ( d. c. 1026/1617) was a famous Ottoman cut-paper artist from Bursa. He usually signed his cut-paper works Fahri Bursavi (Fakhrī Bursawī). His real name was Fahreddin (Fakhr al-Dīn), as indicated by his signature on one of his works in a palace album (H. 2171, fol. 33b). Little is known about his life, even though his reputation as a cut-paper artist spread as far as Europe. One of the earliest references to Fahri is by Aşık Çelebi (Āşık Çelebī), writing in the 970s/1560s, who prais…

Fakhkh is a wādī located approximately four kilometres northwest of the great mosque in Mecca. It is now called al-Shuhadāʾ (the Martyrs) but has also been known as Wādī al-Zāhir. According to Yāqūt (d. 310/923), ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar (d. 132/749–50, son of the second caliph) and other Companions of the Prophet were said to have been buried here. There is a marker in al-Shuhadāʾ for the gravesite of ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar, but it is best known as the site of the battle that ended the ill-fated Zaydī rebel…

Fakhr or iftikhār (self-praise) is a genre of premodern Arabic poetry that flourished especially in pre-Islamic, early Islamic, and Umayyad times (sixth to mid-eighth centuries C.E.). Even though fakhr was the dominant genre of early Arabic poetry, it began to lose its importance in the Umayyad period(41–132/661–750), for both religious and social reasons. The predominance of fakhr gives early Arabic poetry a special tenor that distinguishes it from the poetry of the ʿAbbāsid (132–656/750–1258) and later periods. Fakhr was, in fact, the most genuine expression of the pre…

Mawlānā Muḥammad Fakhr al-Dīn Dihlavī (b. 1126/1714–5, d. 1199/1784–5) was an Indian Ṣūfī master to whom several important sub-branches of the Chishtī-Niẓāmī brotherhood trace their lineage (the Chishtī order was introduced into India by Muʿīn al-Dīn Sijzī, d. 627/1230, after whose second successor, Farīd al-Dīn Masʿūd, d. 664/1266, two large branches developed, the Ṣābiriyya, followers of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ṣābir Kaliyarī, d. 690/1291, and the Niẓāmiyya, followers of Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ, d. 725/1324–5).…

Fakhr al-Dīn Ma ʿ n (980–1045/1572-1635) was a Druze tax farmer from the Shūf region of what is today southern Lebanon, who was appointed governor (beğ) of the Ottoman district (sancak) of Ṣafad in 1001/1592–3. Often celebrated in local historiography as “the emir of the Druze” and, by extension, as the founder of modern Lebanon, more recent Ottomanist research has rather assimilated him to the ayān (Ar. aʿyān) class of Ottoman provincial notables and the Celali rebels of the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. According to the Damascene biographer al-Muḥibbī (d. 1111/16…

Fakhr-i Mudabbir (c.552–633/1157–1236) is the shuhra of Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Manṣūr Mubārak Shāh al-Qurayshī, a Persian author and courtier under successive Ghaznavid, Ghūrid, and Shamsī sultans in South Asia. He is noted for his Persian-language literary masterpieces, the Shajara-yi ansāb (“The tree of genealogies”) and the Ādāb al-ḥarb wa-l-shajāʿa (“The etiquette of war and valour”). Members of Fakhr-i Mudabbir’s family were connected to the Ghaznavid court under Sulṭān Maḥmūd (r. 388–421/998–1030). He claims descent from Bilge Tekin (d. 364/974–5), ruler of Ghazna and g…

Haji Abdur Rozak Fakhruddin (1916–95) was a national leader of the Muhammadiyah, one of the largest Muslim organisations in Indonesia. Fondly nicknamed “Pak A. R.” (after his initials), he was born in February 1916 in the village of Cilangkap, in the Purwanggan area of Pakualaman, near Yogyakarta, Central Java. Yogyakarta had been the birthplace of the Muhammadiyah in 1912. His father was K. H. Fakhruddin (d. 1972), who was a penghulu (judge) and batik trader. Fakhruddin completed his primary education at Standaard School Muhammadiyah in 1923, and then continued w…

Arsānyūs al-Fākhūrī (1800–83) was a Maronite cleric and qāḍī (judge) born in Baʿabdā in Mount Lebanon, known for composing badīʿiyyāt, works in a highly stylised poetic form that usually involves encomiums on the prophet Muḥammad, with each line of the poem illustrating a different rhetorical trope (badīʿ); al-Fākhūrī adapted the form to Christian religious themes. Born Fāris b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm, al-Fākhūrī, a family so named because his great-grandfather oversaw Beirut’s pottery manufactories before moving to Baʿabdā, was educated at the seminary o…

ʿUmar Fākhūrī (1895–1946), a Lebanese man of letters and author of books on literary, social, and political topics, was born in Beirut. While studying law and pharmacy at the American University and the Ottoman College (both in Beirut), he participated in the Arab nationalist uprising against Ottoman rule, in connection to which he wrote, in 1913, a booklet entitled Kayfa yanhaḍ al-ʿArab? (“How can the Arabs rise?”). In 1918 he travelled to Damascus at the invitation of King Fayṣal I to edit the magazine al-ʿĀṣima. In the early 1920s he studied in Paris and took a university de…

Kyai Haji Fakih Usman (1904–68) was a leader of the Muhammadiyah modernist reformist Islamic social and educational movement in Indonesia from the mid-1920s until his death, and a politician of the Masyumi party from its foundation in 1945 until it was banned, in 1960. Fakih Usman was born in Gresik, East Java, and educated at Islamic boarding schools (pesantrens), but had no secular schooling. Following in his father’s business, he became a successful textile and timber trader and shipbuilder by the mid-1920s. He joined the Muhammadiyah movement in 19…

A fakir is a Muslim mystic who lives in poverty. The word used in most Western languages derives from the Arabic faqīr (pl. fuqarāʾ), which means “poor, destitute”; faqr means “poverty.” Appearing twelve times in the Qurʾān and in several ḥadīths, the word means, amongst other meanings that are more numerous and literal and synonymous with miskīn (pauper), the human condition of being in need of God—human beings are ontologically indigent, whereas God alone is self-sufficient (Q 35:15, 47:38)—a sense that inspired the Ṣūfī conception of the fakir (Es…

Fakiri (Faqīrī) was the pen-name of a sixteenth-century minor Ottoman poet, who showed considerable originality in his choice of subjects and genres. His real name and date of birth are unknown; the sources only mention that he was from Kalkandelen (Qalqandelen), today’s Tetovo, near Üsküp (Skopje), and that he spent most of his life in Istanbul. The biographer Latifi (Laṭīfī, d. 990/1582) recounts that he worked as an imam ( imām, leader in public worship), hatip ( khaṭīb, preacher), remmal (geomancer), and tabip (ṭabīb, physician). According to the biographer Aşık (ʿĀşıq) Çe…

Al-Falâh (Ḥarakat al-Falāḥ) has been one of the most important movements of Salafī Islam in West Africa since the middle of the twentieth century. It introduced an innovative educational system and founded several modern Franco-Arab schools. It expanded across French West Africa, despite repressive French colonial policies. Although the movement stagnated in Mauritania, it flourished in Senegal. The movement has also experienced serious internal dissent. In both countries, since the 1990s, the m…

Fallata is the name given in Sudan to the people called Fulbe (Fulani) in West Africa, but it is also a generic term used loosely, with some negative connotations, to refer to all people of West African background, not just the ethnic Fulbe. Those still speaking Fulfulde in Sudan constitute perhaps ten percent of the population. They are spread over the savannah belt across the Sudan from its western border to the Red Sea and extend south along the Blue Nile as far as the borders with Ethiopia and the Republic of South Sudan. The Fallata are diverse in their original home and history of …

Shawkat ʿAlī Khān Badāyūnī (1879–1941), called Fānī, was an early modern poet of the Urdu ghazal. Three ghazal poets contemporary with him were Ḥasrat Mohānī (d. 1951), Jigar Morādābādī (d. 1960), and Aṣghar Gond’avī (d. 1936). The theme running through Fānī’s ghazals is the suffering of being or existence. He composed a few couplets on romantic or playful traditional themes, but they belong mostly to his early work. Fānī was born in Islām Nagar, in Badāyūṇ district, on 12 September 1879. He began to compose ghazals at the age of eleven, but his father, Muḥammad Shujāʿat ʿAlī (d…

Muḥsīn Fānī Kashmīrī (d. 1081/1670–1) was born into an educated family in Kashmir, in the first decades of the eleventh/seventeenth century. According to Taʾrīkh-i Aʿẓmā (“Aʿẓmā’s history”, by Muḥammad Aʿẓam Dīda-marī, d. 1179/1765–6; Rāshidī, 3:1049), he was distantly related to the famous Kashmiri Ṣūfī poet Yaʿqūb Ṣarfī (d. 1003/1594–5). Fānī cannot have been one of Ṣarfī’s students, as some later sources assert, although he does acknowledge him as a poetic influence and model. An anecdote in the principal source for the poet’s life, Mirʾat al-khayāl (“The mirror of imaginati…

Hamzah Fansuri (also Hamzah Pansuri, Ḥamza Fanṣūrī), active in the tenth/sixteenth century, was a prominent Malay Ṣūfī scholar and poet. He was born in Fansur (Barus), in northwest Sumatra. As the geographical distribution of manuscripts of his works and the works in which he was quoted reveals, Hamzah’s oeuvre was well known across the Malay Archipelago, from Aceh, Minangkabau, and Java to South Sulawesi and Buton. He and his writings, which deeply influenced Malay Ṣūfī literature, particularly …

The Āl Bā Faqīh (also known as Bafagih/Bafaqih, and as Bāfaqī in India) is a family of Ḥaḍramī sāda (Ar. pl. of sayyid, designating those who claim descent from the Prophet) known for producing religious teachers, Ṣūfīs, and jurists (Ar. sing. faqīh). All members of the Bā Faqīh family trace their ancestry to Muḥammad Mawlā ʿAydīd (d. 862/1458) b. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlawī b. Muḥammad Ṣāḥib Mirbāṭ. Muḥammad had four sons who produced offspring, ʿAlawī, ʿAbdallāh, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, and ʿAlī. Only t…

Faqīr Muḥammad Faqīr (1900–74) was born in Gujrāṇwālā, in Pakistani Panjāb, to a family of physicians ( ḥakīms) practicing the indigenous system of medicine. He is said to have written his first Panjābī couplet at the death of his father, in 1915. He took a diploma in homeopathic medicine from the Punjab Homeopathic College, Gujrāṇwālā, in 1923. In 1932 he moved to Lahore to practice medicine but left it on the advice of his spiritual guide, ʿAbdallāh Qādirī of Gujrāṇwālā, and became a contractor (Akram, Bābā-yi Panjābī; Akram, Kachchī, 187). His literary work consists primarily of P…

Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), sometimes referred to as the “Second Teacher” in the Arabic tradition (after the “First Teacher,” Aristotle), was one of the foremost Arabic philosophers of the early, classical Islamic period. He was a polymath who wrote on a wide variety of topics, ranging from music, astronomy, astrology, and geometry, to physics, metaphysics, ethics, and the historical evolution of philosophy and religion. He had a decisive impact on the development of Arabic logic, cos…

Al-Fārābī is the pre-eminent theorist on music in the history of the Middle East. Regrettably, Middle Eastern specialists in fields other than music view him only as a political philosopher and logician; musicologists who deal with mediaeval Western music are unaware of his contributions to music theory and his useful commentaries on the treatises of ancient Greek music theorists. Of the approximately one hundred and sixty works al-Fārābī wrote, eight deal with music, but only four are known to have survived. The first and least important is a short chapter on music in Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm (“C…

Adīb al-Mamālik Farāhānī (1860–1917) was a poet, editor, and journalist, and an important intellectual of the late Qājār period. He was born Mīrzā Muḥammad Ṣādiq b. Ḥusayn, on 2 August 1860, in Gāzarān, a small village near Arāk. He was the grandson of Mīrzā Maʿṣūm Muḥīṭ, the brother of the famous Abū l-Qāsim Qāʾim-Maqām (d. 1835), vazīr to Muḥammad Shāh Qājār (r. 1834–48). This lineage might explain the fact that Amīrī (the name he later assumed) was well educated in his father’s home, where he remained until he was 15 years old. At this stage in Am…

Ḥamīd al-Dīn Farāhī (1863–1930) was an Indian scholar of Arabic best known for his writings on the niẓām (broad structural and thematic order) of the Qurʾān. 1. Life He was born at Pharīhā, near Azamgarh, India to a family of zamīndārs (landowners, but, before British rule, specifically landholders responsible for revenue collection) and vakīls (attorneys) who were also scholars of Arabic and Persian. He claimed to have memorised the Qurʾān at the age of ten and studied Arabic, Persian, and the Islamic sciences at home and at nearby Azamgarh with his patern…

Alfrīd Faraj (Alfred Farag, 14 June 1929–4 December 2005), one of Egypt’s leading twentieth-century playwrights, was born to a middle-class Coptic family in the city of Zaqāzīq (Zagāzīg). When he was three years old, his family moved to Alexandria, where he lived until 1949, when he completed his undergraduate education in English literature at the University of Alexandria. Participating in student rallies against the British occupation of Egypt, he found a political identity for himself in the s…

Al-Malik al-Nāṣir Zayn al-Dīn Abū l-Saʿādāt Faraj b. al-Ẓāhir Barqūq b. Anas (791–815/1389–1412), was the twenty-sixth Mamlūk sultan of Egypt, and the second of the Circassian sultans. Born in Cairo, Faraj (“Joy”) succeeded to the sultanate upon his father’s death, on 15 Shawwāl 801/20 June 1399, as a figurehead formally enthroned while several senior officers contended for ultimate control. Their incapacity to resolve the ensuing power struggle prompted their recognition of Faraj’s majority while he …

Farangī Maḥall was a family of prominent Indian Ḥanafī scholars and mystics who flourished from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the twentieth. The family traces its ancestry through the great scholar and mystic Khwāja ʿAbdallāh Anṣārī of Herat (d. 481/1089) to Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, the Prophet’s host in Medina. It is not known when the family migrated to India but, according to family biographers, one ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn settled in Sihālī, in the Awadh province of north India, during the eighth/fourteenth …

Aḥmad Farāz, one of the most popular Urdu poets of the twentieth century, was born Sayyid Aḥmad Shāh in Kohat (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) on 14 January 1931. His mother tongue was Pashto, but in keeping with the family’s tradition he received a firm grounding in Persian. From 1950 he worked as author and producer for Radio Pakistan, first in Karachi and then in Peshawar, where in 1960 he was awarded a master’s degree in Persian and Urdu and began teaching both languages at Peshawar University.…

Al-Farazdaq (c. 20–114/c. 641/732) is the nickname of Abū Firās Hammām b. Ghālib b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa, a great Umayyad poet and one of the best Arab poets of all time. His nickname, meaning “lump of dough” or “loaf of bread,” was purportedly given to him because of his plump face. He was born into a prominent and wealthy family of camel-breeders settled in the bādiya (desert) of Basra. He belonged to the Mujāshiʿ b. Dārim, a sub-tribe of the Tamīm, while his mother was descended from the Ḍabba, another powerful North Arabian tribe. Both his father Ghālib and his gran…

The Farghana (Farghāna) Valley, situated in the southeastern corner of present-day Uzbekistan and surrounded by the Tien Shan and Pamir mountain ranges, has been both a crossroads of civilisations and one of the most densely populated regions of Central Asia since ancient times. In the arid climate of Central Asia, the Farghana Valley offers fertile soil and an abundance of water, drawn primarily from the annual snowmelt that feeds the Narin, Qara Darya, and Syr Darya rivers and the hundreds of kil…

Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Kathīr al-Farghānī (d. after 247/861), an astronomer at the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–33), wrote an influential compendium of Ptolemy’s Almagest in thirty chapters and a description of the construction of the astrolabe. Ibn al-Nadīm (d. c. 385/995), in his Kitāb al-fihrist (ed. Gustav Flügel, 2 vols., Leipzig 1871–2, esp. 1:279), mentions another book by al-Farghānī, on sundials. Only a fragment of his treatise on the seven climates survives (Cairo, Dar al-Kutub, MS Muṣṭafā Fāḍil, mīqāt 194/3, fol. 32r; the preceding anonymous…

Saʿīd al-Dīn Abū ʿUthmān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Kāsānī al-Farghānī (c. 629-99/1231-1300) was a prominent Muslim scholar and mystic from Khurāsān. He was born in the town of Kāsān, in the valley of Farghāna, in Central Asia, from which his dual nisba (the part of a name indicating tribal origin or location and later often referring to a special characteristic or profession), “al-Kāsānī al-Farghānī,” is derived. On a manuscript of his Mashāriq al-darārī (“The rising places of the stars”), the alternate ascription “al-Kādānī” is also given. Chittick reports varying deat…

Mirzā Farḥat Allāh Beg (b. c.1886, d. 1947) was an Urdu humorist, biographer, historian, literary critic, critical editor, and official in Hyderabad. 1. Life Much of what is known about Farḥat Allāh’s life comes from his own writings, including a lengthy autobiography, Merī dāstān (“My story,” published posthumously), and from accounts by those who knew him (see Yazdānī). He was the descendant of a family of immigrants from Badakhshān who came to India during the time of the Mughal emperor Shāh ʿĀlam II (r. 1173–1202/1759–88 and 1203–21/…

Ilyās Ḥabīb Farḥāt (1893–1976) is one of the pre-eminent poets of the Arab emigré (mahjar) school in South America. He was born in 1893 in Kafr Shīmā, Lebanon where he attended various village schools, learning basic Arabic and English. At the age of ten, he left school to work as carpenter, typesetter, and manual labourer in Beirut and Zahleh. In 1910 he followed his brothers to Brazil, where he lived in several cities, including São Paulo and Brasília, and worked as a pig farmer, journalist, peddler, and me…

Jirmānūs (Germanus) Farḥāt (1081–1145/1670–1732) was a Christian Arab clergyman and prolific author who became famous mainly for his works on Arabic grammar and language and his poetry. He is considered a forerunner of the Nahḍa, the Arabic literary renaissance of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous Maronite family in Aleppo, the intellectual centre of Arab Christianity in the first centuries of Ottoman rule, Farḥāt received at the Maronite school of Aleppo (al-Kuttāb al-Mārūnī) a thorough education in the traditions of his comm…

Farīd is the author of a small collection of poems in early Panjābī that is preserved in the Sikh scriptures. This collection, the Ādi Grant̲h̲ (AG), was compiled in the Gurmukhi script by the fifth Sikh guru, Arjan, in 1013/1604. It comprises four short hymns (shabad) and 112 couplets (shalok) composed mostly in the common mediaeval Indian metrical form known as dohā and its close variants (AG, 488, 794, 1377–84, translated in Macauliffe, 6:391–414; Talib, 97–124). There has been some dispute about whether the traditional identification of this Farīd with the great Chishtī Ṣūfī shaykh F…

Masʿūd b. Sulaymān, known popularly as Farīd al-Dīn Masʿūd “Ganj-i Shak(k)ar” (lit., treasure of sugar) or simply Bābā Farīd (b. c.569/1174, d. c.670/1271) was one of the most celebrated Ṣūfīs of mediaeval India. Born in Koťhvāl, a small town near Multan, he was descended from the ruling family of Kabul. Under the pressure of incursions by the Ghuzz tribe of Central Asian Turkmens in Khurāsān in the mid-sixth/twelfth century, his grandfather Qāḍī Shuʿayb emigrated to India, where he was appointed qāḍī (judge) of Koťhvāl; his son Jamāl al-Dīn Sulaymān also served as the qāḍī there. Bābā …

Shahīdallāh Farīdī (1915–78), also known as John Gilbert Lennard, was an English convert to Islam who became an influential pīr (Pers., lit. “old,” used as a synonym of shaykh or murshid in northern India) of the Chishtī Ṣābirī ṭarīqa (lit. “way,” and hence “Ṣūfī order”; the Chishtiyya, founded in Chisht, a small town near Herat, about 318/930 by Abū Isḥāq Shāmī, d. 328/940, was introduced into India by Muʿīn al-Dīn Sijzī, d. 627/1230; two branches emerged after the death of Farīd al-Dīn “Ganj-i Shakkar,” d. 663/1265, the second suc…

Muḥammad Farīd (1868–1919) was a prominent Egyptian nationalist politician during the early phase of British colonial rule and the second leader of al-Ḥizb al-Waṭanī (National Party), which he co-founded with Muṣṭafā Kāmil (1874–1908) and others as a secret society in 1893 and a formal political party in 1907. Farīd was born in Cairo into a wealthy landed family. He attended several of the new Western-modelled schools established by the khedivial regime. After graduating from the School of Administration and Languages (Madrasat al-Idāra wa-l-…

The Farīghūnids (Āl-i Farīghūn, Banū Farīghūn) were the ruling dynasty of Gūzgān (Gūzgānān, Gūzgānyān, Arabic al-Jūzjān), in present-day northern Afghanistan, and vassals of the Sāmānids from the late third/ninth century until the early fifth/eleventh century. The name is possibly derived from the legendary figure Farīdūn/Afrīdūn, as the author of the Ḥudūd al-ʿālam argues (95; trans., 106). The dynasty may also be related to the Afrīghid line of Khwārazmshāhs (r. from 305 C.E. to 385/995). The geographer al-Muqaddasī mentions a Ribāṭ Afrīghūn i…

Bishr Fāris (born Idwār Fāris, 1907–63) was a poet, playwright, short-story writer, and scholar of Islam. It is not clear whether he was born in Lebanon or Egypt, but we know that he spent most of his life in Egypt. He earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1932, for his dissertation entitled “L’honneur chez les Arabes avant l’Islam. Étude de sociologie” (“Honour among the pre-Islamic Arabs. A sociological study”). His literary output was primarily in Arabic, but he wrote his scholarly essays and books in a combination of French and Arabic. He was considered a symbolist poet in the se…

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Ghaffār al-Fārisī (288–377/919–87) was one of the best known and most prolific Arab grammarians of the fourth/tenth century. He was born in the Iranian town Fasā, hence his nisba al-Fasawī, which he himself never used. His father was Persian, and his mother was an Arab woman of the Banū Sadūs. In 307/919 he came to Baghdad, where he received a rigorous education in philology from al-Akhfash al-Aṣghar (d. 315/927), Ibn al-Sarrāj (d. 316/928), al-Zajjāj (d. 311/923), Ibn Durayd (d. 3…

Kamāl al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan Muḥammad al-Fārisī, an eighth/fourteenth-century scholar who was probably born in Tabriz or Isfahan, wrote important works on optics and mathematics. Two of his teachers, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311) and Ibn al-Khaddām al-Baghdādī (b. 643/1245), were disciples of the polymath Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274), the first director of the observatory in Marāgha, the construction and maintenance of which was supported by the Īlkhānid ruler Hülegü (r. 654–63/1256–65). Quṭ…

Ghāʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān (b. 1927, in Baghdad, d. 17 August 1990, in Moscow) is the writer who best represents social-realist fiction in Iraqi literature. His short stories and novels focus on social issues affecting the suffering Iraqi people. His readings in Russian literature and his career as a journalist and a translator of Russian literature stamped his style and representations of social life with pictorial density and a pensive tone. He spent more than half his life in exile in Moscow. While his representations of the oppressed under conditions of war, misrule, and exploi…

Abū Yaʿqūb Farqad b. Yaʿqūb al-Sabakhī, a Basran renunciant ( zāhid, one who renounces the world for spiritual reasons), was apparently born to a Christian family in Armenia but moved to Basra, where he supported himself as a weaver and died in 131/748–9 or earlier. His nisba, al-Sabakhī, refers to the sabkhas (salt flats) to which he would retreat. He is regularly called a worshipper (ʿābid), implying that he devoted much time to supererogatory ritual prayer. Stories about him and his reported sayings are mostly encouragements to austerity. For example, some…

Abū Zakariyyāʾ Yaḥyā b. Ziyād al-Daylamī al-Farrāʾ (144–207/761–822) was the most important Arabic grammarian of the Kufan school in the second/eighth century. Al-Farrāʾ, whose family came from Daylam, a region near Gīlān, in Iran, was born in Kufa. He grew up there and became a mawlā of the Banū Asad or the Banū Minqar. At an early stage in his life he left for Baghdad, where he continued his education in ḥadīth, general philology, fiqh, and other related subjects, thus acquiring wide-ranging knowledge in many diverse fields of learning. He studied under prominent s…

Farrukhābād is a town and district in Uttar Pradesh (India) founded in 1126/1714 by the Afghan war jobber Muḥammad Khān Bangash Karlānī (d. 1156/1743). Like many other Afghan migrants, Muḥammad Khān profited from India’s bustling demand for military labour and horses and carved out a small but powerful principality of his own. One year earlier, after two decades of military service for the warring chiefs of Bundelkhand, Muḥammad Khān effectively entered the imperial fray. As commander of an elephant corps (jamāʿadār-i fīl-sawār), he supported Farrukh Siyar’s (r. 1124–31/1713…

Farrukh Ḥusayn, also called Farrukh Beg, was a painter active in Iran, Khurāsān, and the Subcontinent between about 988/1580 and 1030/1620–1. His identity is debated, but the current consensus is that one person, known as Farrukh Ḥusayn or Farrukh Beg, worked in five royal contexts: Ṣafavid Khurāsān, the kingdom of Kabul, ʿĀdil Shāhī Bījāpūr, and Mughal India (twice, with interruption). Little is known about Farrukh’s early life in Ṣafavid Iran. Iskandar Beg Munshī’s (d. c.1042/1632) history of the Ṣafavids mentions two painters—Siyāvush, of Georgian or…

Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Jūlūgh Farrukhī Sīstānī (c. 390–431/1000–40), an eminent Persian poet, was born in the region of Sīstān. His father was a high-ranking servant of the Ṣaffārid amīr of Sīstān, Aḥmad Khalaf Bānū (r. 352–93/963–1003). According to the ancient tadhkiras (biographies), he was gifted from an early age in composing verse and playing the lute and used these skills to make a living, in the service of a major landowner. With time, his salary became insufficient to meet his needs, and, having obtained no increase from his prot…

ʿUmar Farrūkh (1906–1987) was a Lebanese literary historian, poet, and university instructor. He was born in Beirut to a conservative Muslim family. After completing his elementary and secondary education at various schools in Beirut, he earned his bachelor of arts degree from the American University in Beirut in 1928. After graduation, Farrūkh taught at various schools in Naples and Beirut. In the mid-1930s, he completed his higher education at universities in France and Germany, obtaining his P…

Furūgh Zamān Farrukhzād (1313–45sh/1935–67), among the greatest Iranian poets of the twentieth century, was born in Tehran to a family that valued art and literature. She attended school in Tehran and was married in 1951 at the age of sixteen, becoming a mother in the following year. Renouncing family life, she divorced her husband in 1954, considering marital life an obstacle to her literary passions. Farrukhzād began to compose verse in a classical style while still a teenager. Her first poetic collection, titled Asīr (“The captive”) was published in 1955. The collection con…

The farsakh (pl. farāsikh), or parasang, was a measure of distance based on a notion of time. Originating in Iran (or Parthia, to be more precise) this unit passed first into the Armenian and Syriac languages (as hrasakh and prasakhā, respectively) before being first documented in Arabic in the first/seventh century. The Persians used the term “farsakh” alongside the more Iranian form “farsang.” From the ʿAbbāsid period onwards, the use of farsakh as a unit of length spread among Muslims throughout the Middle East in the mediaeval period. Indeed, the milliary dista…

Al-Fārūq is the most frequent of the many titles conferred on the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 13–23/634–44) (Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī, 1:210–1). So commonly was it used that it came to be considered a second or substitute name.There are numerous references in ḥadīth (traditions) (Bashear), and several Islamic poets contemporary with ʿUmar already refer in their poems to the caliph simply as al-Fārūq. Taken at face value, this early poetry suggests that the caliph was accorded this title during his lifetime. This is confirmed in a poem by a then-recent convert to Islam (mukhaḍram), Umay…

ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-Fārūqī al-Fawrī al-ʿUmarī, one of the most distinguished writers of mid-nineteenth-century Iraq, was born in 1203/1788 or 1204/1789 in Mosul and died in Baghdad in Jumādā I 1278/November 1861. He was called Sulṭān Bānī l-Ādāb (the lord of the people of literature) (Abū l-Thanāʾ al-Ālūsī, Gharāʾib, 24), and his death was regarded by the poet al-Akhras (d. 1873) as a “disaster for Iraq” (cited in Cheikho, 9). Al-Fārūqī’s elaborate poems circulated amongst the educated elite in Ottoman Iraq, Syria, and Istanbul. His work provide…

Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (Ismāʿīl Rājī al-Fārūqī, 1921–86) was a distinguished scholar of Islam and religion and one of the most prolific and influential Muslim scholars of the modern age. He made lasting contributions to the study of Islam and comparative religion in the areas of the history and phenomenology of religion, Islamic thought, and interfaith dialogue. 1. Early life and academic career Ismail al-Faruqi was born in Jaffa in 1921 into a religiously influential family. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in the humanities from the American University…

The Fārūqīs ruled the small sultanate of Khandesh, in the northwestern Deccan, from 772/1370 to 1009/1601. The Fārūqīs briefly claimed independence but were compelled to recognise that they could not wield as great a sovereignty as their neighbours. They employed the title Khān, which did not denote independent sovereignty, rather than Sulṭān, which did. Khandesh was an interstitial principality that took shape during the fragmentation of the Delhi Sultanate, after the death of Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq…

ʿIzz al-Dīn Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar b. al-Faraj b. Aḥmad b. Sābūr b. ʿAlī b. Ghunayma al-Wāsiṭī al-Fārūthī (614-94/1217-8-95) was an Iraqi traditionist, Qurʾān scholar, jurist, preacher, and Ṣūfī of the Shāfiʿī juridical school who was associated with the early Rifāʿiyya and Suhrawardiyya Ṣūfī orders. He was born in Wāsiṭ in 614/1217–8. His grandfather, ʿUmar al-Fārūthī, was a disciple of Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī (d. 578/1182), the eponym of the Rifāʿiyya Ṣūfī lineage. ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Fārūthī came to be affili…

The Banū Fasānjus were a prominent family of bureaucrats from Shiraz who served the Būyid amīrs and ʿAbbāsid caliphs during the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. Abū l-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās b. Fasānjus was the first member of the family to work in the Būyid administration. He began life as a wealthy notable in Shiraz. In 338/949–50, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṣaymarī (339/950–1), the wazīr of the amīr Muʿizz al-Dawla (r. in Iraq 334–56/945–67), recruited him to take over the administration of Basra (Miskawayh, 2:120). His appointment to this position was probably due…

Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Sufyān b. Jawwān (Jawān, Juwān?) al-Fasawī (c.190-277?/806-90?) was a Persian traditionist, appearing in two of the Six Books (the best-regarded Sunnī collections of ḥadīth). His nisba refers to Fasā, a city in the province of Fars (al-Samʿānī, al-Ansāb, s.v. Fasawī). He was born in about 190/806. Some of his Kufan and Basran shaykhs (authorities) died as early as 213/828, so he must have begun to travel in quest of ḥadīth at least by then. He also collected ḥadīth in Mecca, Egypt, Syria, Baghdad, and Mesopotamia. He was back in Fars by 237/851–2 and rea…

Al-Fāshir (El Fasher), current population approximately 260,000, is the capital of the wilāya (province) of North Darfur in the Republic of Sudan and was the capital of the independent Darfur sultanate from 1791 to 1916. In 1785, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Bukr (r. 1785–1801) took power in the Darfur sultanate, today the western region of Sudan. Seeking a new seat of power, he moved the centre of the sultanate from the west to the east of the Jebel Marra mountains and established his royal encampment (fāshir) at a well and caravan centre called the Rahad Tandalī in 1791–2. The new …

The Fashoda Incident of 1898 followed the Berlin Conference (also called the Congo Conference) of European diplomats in 1884–5, which played a decisive role in the partitioning of Africa. The picture of Africa being divided up like a birthday cake at this conference, as often presented in the literature, is not entirely correct. In fact, the meeting’s primary purpose was to avoid future crises among the imperial powers over Africa. In the following three decades (until the outbreak of the First Wo…

Al-Fāsī is the nisba, that is, the personal name denoting origin, of a famous Moroccan family, originally from al-Andalus, which traces its descent from the Banū l-Jadd al-Fihriyyūn, a branch of the Quraysh al-ʿAdnāniyya (Pellat; al-Fāsī, Maʿlamat al-Maghrib, 6409–12). The first members of the family settled in Fez (Fās) in the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century. Historically, members of the al-Fāsī family were known above all for their religious scholarship and devotion to Ṣūfism, with some holding highly esteemed positions at the famous univ…

Taqī l-Dīn Muḥammad al-Fāsī (775–832/1373–1429) was a religious scholar, jurist, and historian. Born in Mecca to a notable family of scholars and jurists, al-Fāsī was raised in Medina and educated there and in Mecca, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen. In Mecca, he served as Mālikī chief judge and professor of Mālikī law, but he is most famous for his historical writing. On his father’s side, the family claimed descent from the Prophet through his grandson, al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 49/669–70), a lineage shared with the ruling sharīfs of Mecca, and from Idrīs I (r. 172–5/789–91), the …

Al-Fāsiyya (called also al-Raḥmāniyya or al-Makkiyya) is a nineteenth-century offshoot of the Shādhiliyya Ṣūfī brotherhood (the Shādhiliyya, founded by the Moroccan Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī, d. 656/1258, is well established in North Africa and the Middle East). The Fāsiyya was founded in 1850 in Mecca by the Moroccan shaykh Muhammad b. Muḥammad b. Masʿūd b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Fāsī (d. 1872 or 1878), a deputy of the Shādhilī-Darqāwī shaykh Muḥammad b. Ḥamza al-Madanī (d. 1846) and perhaps also a disciple of the reformist Ṣūfī scholar Aḥmad Ibn Idrīs (d. 1837) (th…

Faskyu is the Arabic name of the Greek island of Ithaca (Greek Ithake), in the Ionian Sea west of mainland Greece, northeast of Cephalonia (Kephallenia) and south of Leukas. It is called: in Latin, Ithaci/Ithaki, in Byzantium’s commercial concessions to Venice; in Italian, Val de Compar[e]; in Old French, Theachi ( Chronicle of the Morea, ed. Jean Lognon, Livre de la conqueste de la princée de l’Amorée, Paris 1911, § 239); in Turkish, Siyaki, and variants in Soustal and Koder, 168–9, and Kordoses, Ithake, 42–6, 262–6 (with topographical observations). Ithake was made part of t…

Fatahillah is remembered in Indonesia as a sixteenth-century Muslim hero who ejected the Portuguese from the port of Sunda Kalapa, in Java, and renamed it Jayakarta (or a similar name), thus becoming the founder of what is now the Indonesian capital city of Jakarta. The Portuguese came to the area in 1522, when the still-Hindu state of Banten (a major pepper port) was under threat from the Muslim state of Demak, farther east on the north coast of Java. The Portuguese agreed to build a fortified position on Banten’s eastern frontiers, at a…

Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Zayn al-Faṭānī (1856–1908), was a Southeast Asian scholar and publisher based in Mecca. Born in the town of Yaring in Patani, then a semi-autonomous sultanate on the Malay-Thai Peninsula, he came from an reputable family of shaykhs and had been taken to Mecca while still a boy. He received an eclectic education by studying with many of his countrymen, who were numerous in Mecca at the time, as well as a number of esteemed ḥadīth scholars, leaders of the Aḥmadiyya ṭarīqa (Sufi order), anti-Salafī figures such as Sayyid Aḥmad b. Zaynī Daḥlān (d. 1886), and well…

Al-Fatāt was a secret organisation established by Arab students in 1909, in Paris, and active in Syria until the French occupation of Syria in July 1920. The first Arab clandestine society formed during the Young Turk period, it took the name Jamʿiyyat al-Umma al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatāt (Society of the Young Arab Nation). Confronting the Turkification policies of the Young Turks, the society strived to protect the “natural rights” of the Arab nation within the Ottoman Empire. Numbering about forty me…

Al-Fatāwā l-ʿĀlamgīriyya (also known as al-Fatāwā l-Hindiyya) is a compendium of Ḥanafī legal opinions commissioned by the Mughal sultan Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr (r. 1068–1118/1658–1707; ʿĀlamgīr means “world conqueror”) and written by a board of more than forty Ḥanafī scholars. The text was compiled between 1664/1074 and 1672/1082 in Delhi, capital of the Mughal empire from 932/1526 to 1171/1758, under the supervision of Shaykh Niẓām of Burhānpūr (d. 1089/1678), a prominent scholar and close friend of the …

Fatayat, established in 1950, is the young women’s section of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s traditionalist and largest Muslim organisation, which was founded in 1926. Pressed by Kyai Haji Muhammad Dahlan (1909–97), NU’s executive chief, a small group of young women in East Java, mostly daughters of kyais (the Javanese term for ʿulamāʾ, Muslim religious scholars), set up the organisation, despite fierce opposition from some charismatic kyais who hampered its progress. Three young women are credited with taking this initiative: Murthosiyah, Khuzaimah Man…

Fatehpur Sikri (Pers., Fatḥpūr Sīkrī) is a town in Uttar Pradesh, India, thirty-seven kilometres from the city of Agra. Situated at latitude N 27.091°, longitude E 77.661°, the area receives little rainfall and is near the desert of present-day Rajasthan. This small town is associated today with a large palace complex built in the second half of the tenth/sixteenth century by the Mughal emperor Akbar on a rocky ridge about one by three kilometres and adjacent to a lake, now dry. This complex, con…

Al-Fatḥ (also Fataḥ, an inverted acronym for Ḥarakat al-Taḥrīr al-Waṭanī al-Filasṭīnī, Palestinian National Liberation Movement) has dominated the Palestinian National Movement since 1969. It was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by Palestinian migrant workers, most of them professionals employed there. Yāsir ʿArafāt (1929–2004), who studied engineering in Cairo and started his political career as a student leader in the early 1950s in Egypt, controlled the movement almost from the beginning. Even after his death, in November 2004, he remained the symbol for Palestinian nationalism. Th…

Mīr Sayyid Fatḥallāh Shīrāzī (d. 996/1588 or 997/1589) was a scholar, inventor, and statesman who served the Bījāpūr sultanate and the Mughal Empire. The year of his birth is unknown, but he grew up in Shiraz and studied with the great scholar-statesmen of the “School of Shiraz” (referring to a school of thought propounded by Shirazi scholars wherein elements from the illuminists and peripatetic traditions of philosophy were harmonized), such as Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī (d. 948/1542), Jamāl a…

Al-Fatḥ b. Khāqān (b. c. 200/817–8, d. 247/861–2) was an ʿAbbāsid courtier, diplomat, and scholar. His father, Khāqān ʿUrṭūj, was probably of Turkic/Inner Asian noble origin, as the (reconstructed) name suggests. There are no indications of ties to the Farghāna (Fergana) valley (pace Pinto, “Favorito,” 134) nor of enslavement of any family members, as was the case with many of the so-called Atrāk (Inner Asian soldiers, lit., Turks) of ʿAbbāsid Sāmarrāʾ. The family probably represented the presence…

Ḥasan Fatḥī (Hassan Fathy; 1900–89) remains the best-known Egyptian architect of the twentieth century, and the one with the widest international impact. This is largely due to his publication, in multiple editions and languages commencing in 1961, of the book Architecture for the poor. In this work, he espoused the values of traditional construction techniques that were not only imbued with an innate beauty deriving from craftsmanship but were also economically and environmentally sustainable. He was profoundly influenced by mudbrick va…

Abū Naṣr Abū Muḥammad b. Saʿīd al-Fatḥ al-Mawṣilī (d. 220/835) was a renunciant (zāhid), weeper ( bakkāʾ), and minor transmitter of ḥadīth, and he was claimed as a forebear by Ṣūfīs. He was an Arab from Kār, near Mosul (Mawṣil), who spent time in Baghdad visiting his close friend Bishr al-Ḥāfī (d. 227/841), a renunciant and forebear for the Sufis who lived most of his life in Baghdad, as well as the circle of Sarī al-Saqaṭī (d. c. 251/865), uncle of the famous early Persian Ṣūfī Junayd al-Baghdādī (d. 298/911). He i…

Al-Fātiḥa (“The opening”) is the first sūra of the Qurʾān, a brief liturgical invocation. It is considered the most important sūra, both doctrinally (some maintain that it synthesises the whole content of the Qurʾān) and liturgically (it is recited many times daily, in the canonical prayer, ṣalāt). Tradition confers on the Fātiḥa a variety of epithets, the most common being “Mother of the Book.” Issues regarding the Fātiḥa concern its dating; the inclusion of the initial invocation (tasmiya or basmala) and the numbering of the verses; formal variations; interpretation of c…

Niyāz Fatḥpurī (1882–1966), commonly known as Niyāz Fatiḥpurī, is famous in Urdu-speaking circles of India and Pakistan for his poetry and fiction and, especially, for his controversial views on religion. He published Nigār (“Picture”), a literary magazine that promoted classical Urdu literature, although it also published more recent works. The magazine published a special issue every year celebrating a particular littérateur or literary genre. Fatiḥpurī also wrote about religious issues and answered questions on history and religion. The popular Istifsār (“Inquiry”) colu…

Fāṭima, daughter of the prophet Muḥammad and his first wife Khadīja, is venerated throughout the Islamic world. She married her father’s cousin ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and gave birth to al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, the only male descendants of the Prophet. Historical sources on her life are scarce and often shaped by religio-political tendencies. Fāṭima is the numinous female figure of Islam, adored in religious traditions and cosmogonic myths of the Shīʿa. As the favourite daughter of the Prophet and bearer of his baraka, she is also honoured in Sunnī Islam and popular belief. 1. Scholarship Decad…

Fāṭima al-Yashruṭiyya (1891–1978) was the daughter of Shaykh ʿAlī Nūr al-Dīn al-Yashruṭī (d. 1899) of the Yashruṭī ṭarīqa (Ṣūfī order), and a rare example, in her time, of a female scholar, spiritual guide, and writer. Her father’s spiritual lineage was Shādhilī, through Shaykh al-Madanī (d. 1847) and before him Shaykh al-Darqāwī (d. 1823), both from North Africa (the Shādhiliyya, founded by the Moroccan Abū l-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī, d. 656/1258, is well established in North Africa and the central Middle-East). After the death of his shaykh in 1847, Shaykh al-Yashruṭī, was reputedl…