Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Gabriel (Ar. Jibrīl, as in the Cairo Qurʾān, or Jabrāʾīl; from Hebr. Gabrīʾēl, probably through Christian Palestinian Aramaic Gabrīl) appears in two passages of the Qurʾān (Q 2:97–98; 66:4). In Islamic tradition he is an angel closely associated with the prophet Muḥammad. 1. Gabriel in the Qurʾān While the Qurʾān does not explicitly call Gabriel an angel, in al-Baqara (2:97–8) it does make him the agent of divine revelation, in accord with Jewish and Christian tradition. Gabriel plays the role of heavenly messenger in Daniel (8:16; 9:21), interpreting …

Gagauz is an Oghuz Turkic language spoken today mainly in the Republic of Moldova and in southern Ukraine, and to a lesser extent in Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus. Speakers of the language are Christians. Gagauz was rarely used as a literary language until the mid-twentieth century. Although it is closely related to the Turkish of Turkey, it has developed features that are uncommon in Turkish (and in Turkic languages generally) through long-standing contact with Slavic languages and the widespread bilin…

The Gagauz are a Turkic speaking community living mainly in the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauziya (part of the Republic of Moldova) and in the Odessa oblast of the Ukraine. Smaller groups of Gagauz live in Bulgaria, Greece, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and the Russian Federation. They number in total between 200,000 and 250,000 persons, the majority of whom (approximately 180,000) live in southern Moldova and in the Ukraine. Most Gagauz adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith, a few belong to Protestan…

Galatasarayı, the lycée of Galatasaray, was an exemplary secondary school of the late Ottoman Empire. Known in Ottoman Turkish as Mekteb-i Sultani (Mekteb-i Sulṭānī, the Imperial School), it was founded in 1284/1868 as the result of a joint Franco-Ottoman initiative. Built on the site of a series of educational institutions dating back to the palace schools founded in the late ninth/fifteenth cen…

Galatat-ı meşhure (Ghalaṭāt-ı meşhūre, “well-known errors”) is the name given to a word or group of words that are commonly used in Turkish although they are incorrect, but whose use is acceptable. The word galat ( ghalaṭ, “error, corruption of a word”), as an infinitive in Arabic (“to be mistaken, to err”), is given various meanings in Arabic dictionaries, such as “error,” “mistake,” or even “a slip.” It is also possible to describe galat as an incompatibility that occurs between what is expressed and what the speaker actually desires to express, without any element of intent. In Turkish dictionaries galat is defined as “a word or group of words that come into a language from ot…

Galen (129-c. 216 C.E.), known to the Arabs as Jālīnūs, was a Greek-speaking physician born in Pergamum. His career, which unfolded essentially in Rome under the reign of emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and Septimius Severus, occupies a place in the history of Arab medicine comparable to that of Aristotle with respect to philosophy. His vast work (more than 20,000 pages in the standard edition by C. G. Kühn, Leipzig 1821–33) representing one eighth of the totality of preserved Greek literatu…

Şeyh Galip (Shaykh Ghālib) Dede, whose given name was Mehmed Esat (Meḥmed Esʿad), was an Ottoman poet and Mevlevi (Mawlawī) şeyh born in Istanbul, most likely around 1171/1757 (judging from the chronograms cezbetullah (cezbetullāh) and eser-i aşk (ether-i ʿaşq) in contemporary Ottoman sources). His father was Mustafa Reşid (Muṣṭafā Reşīd) Efendi (d. 1219/1804), a dervish in the Mevlevi order, with Melami (Melāmī) affiliations, and his mother was Emine Hanım (Emīne Khanım, d. 1209/1794). Galip received no formal schooling but was primarily educated in his father’s hou…

Ganizade Nadiri (Ghanīzāde Nādirī, c. 980–1036/1572–1626–7) was an Ottoman scholar, judge, poet, and calligrapher from Istanbul. His full name is recorded as Mehmed Nadiri b. Abdülgani b. Emir Şah b. Mahmut b. Bayezit (Meḥemmed Nādirī b. ʿAbdülghanī b. Emīr Şāh b. Maḥmūd b. Bāyezīd), and Nadiri (Nādirī) was his penname. Ganizade was from a scholarly family; his father Abdülgani (‘Abdülghanī) was a prolific author, who also served as a teacher and judge, and his brother Abdülcebbar (ʿAbdülcebbār) was a poet, with the penname Celili (Celīlī).…

Garami (Gharāmī, b. 906/1500–1) was a tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman poet, who recorded his name as Seyyid Mehmed b. Mustafa (Seyyid Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā) in his divan ( dīvān, collection of poems) (Gharāmī, 155b). Sehi (Sehī) Bey’s biographic anthology Heşt-Behişt notes that Garami was called kadıcık oğlu ( Qāḍīcıq oghlu, “son of the “little kadı”) (İsen, 242), from which it can be inferred that his father was a kadı (judge). Garami was born in Karaferye (today’s Veroia), near Thessaloniki, in Greece. The sources do not provide any information about his date of birth, but in his divan Gar…

Gardens took many forms in Islamic lands, from the quadripartite chahār bāgh to the stepped terrace garden, the simple courtyard with central water basin, and many other plans. In addition to simply offering respite from the hot arid conditions of the surrounding landscape, the garden could express important ideas about sovereignty, territory, stewardship, wealth, and religion. While domestic and palace gardens were often sites of entertainment, they could also be stages for political display. In cemeterie…

Abū Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy b. al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. Maḥmūd Gardīzī (fl. first half of the fifth/eleventh century) is important as an historian of the eastern Islamic world, in particular, for the first four centuries or so of Islam. His life and career are very obscure, with neither his birth nor death dates known. His family presumably came from Gardīz and the region of Zamīndāwar in eastern Afghanistan. He probably held some function at the Ghaznavid court or in the bureaucracy; the title of his book, the Zayn al-akhbār (“Ornament of histories”) seems to be an allusion to the laqab (honorific) of th…

Garebeg (also grebeg) is the Javanese term for a grand ceremony celebrated three times a year at the kratons (royal courts) of Yogyakarta, Surakarta, and Cirebon, coinciding with the Islamic feasts of Mawlid al-Nabī (birthday of the Prophet), ʿĪd al-Fiṭr (festival of the breaking of the fast), and ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā (sacrificial feast). Garebeg Mulud is celebrated on 12 Rabīʿ I, Garebeg Puasa on 1 Shawwāl, and Garebeg Besar on 10 Dhū l-Ḥijja. Although ʿĪd al-Fiṭr and ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā are the only obligatory feasts according …

İsmail Gasprinski (Ismāʿīl Ghaṣprinskī/Gaspıralı) was a Crimean Tatar intellectual, educator, publisher, and politician. He was born on 8 O.S. (21 N.S.) March 1851 in Avcıköy (Bağçasaray/Bakhchysarai district), Crimea. His parents, Mustafa Ağa and Fatma Hanım, came from Crimean noble families. His father was born in Gaspra, from which İsmail took his family name Gasprinski. He studied first in the the Zincirli Madrasa in Bağçasaray. In 1861 he entered the gymnasium in Aqmescit (Simferopol) and after two years attended the Voronezh Military Academy.…

Suluk Gatholoco was an anti-Islamic work in Javanese evidently written in East Java in the 1870s in reaction to Islamic reform movements. In the 1870s, Islamic reform was making headway amongst Javanese, but it also precipitated adverse reactions. One was the emergence of a social category known as the abangan, or “nominal Muslims” who did not embrace—indeed, evidently even abandoned the former practice of—Islamic rituals and attenuated their sense of Islamic identity. Another reaction took the form of anti-Islamic writing that rejected Islam …

Gaur (Gawr), one of the largest mediaeval cities in India, lies in latitude 24.87° N and longitude 88.17° E, in northwestern Bengal, between the present Ganges (Bhāgirathi) and Mahānandā rivers, on the bank of an abandoned channel of the Ganges. From the early seventh/thirteenth century until 743/1342–3, with the exception of brief intervals, and again from 836/1432–3 to 973/1565–6, it was the capital of the sultanate of Bengal. During the intervening years, the capital had shifted to Pandua, 32…

Gaykhātū b. Abāqā (r. 690–4/1291–5), the second son of the Īlkhān Abāqā Khān (r. 663–80/1265–82), was the fifth ruler of the Īlkhānid dynasty. He was probably born between 640/1242 and 650/1252, and his mother, Nūqdān Khātūn, was a Tatar related to two of Chinggis (Genghis) Khān’s wives. Buddhist monks bestowed him with the name Irinjin Dorjin (“Jewel Diamond”) at his birth, but during or shortly after his coronation, he assumed the name Gaykhātū, which means “astonishing” in Mongolian. Gaykhātū ascended to the throne after the death of his older brother Arghūn (690/1291)…

Gaza is a town in southern Palestine that lies at the junction of Via Maris, the old overland route that connects the Syrian territories with Egypt, and various caravan routes from the Arabian Peninsula. The town’s close connections to Egypt and Arabia distinguish it from other Mediterranean port cities. Gaza’s old town centre is situated on a low hill about three kilometres from the sea, within rich agricultural lands, favoured by advantageous water-table levels. From antiquity it was a major t…

Gaza’s location on the land route “al-darb al-sulṭāni” (“the sultan’s way”) between Egypt and al-Shām (Greater Syria) made its architecture and art a melting pot of various architectural and decorative elements, adapted to the city’s particular spatial, environmental, and geographic settings. Almost all the historic buildings are located within the former city walls above the dwellings of Roman-Byzantine Gaza (Sadeq, The city of Gaza; Glucker) and in the adjacent al-Shujāʿiyya neighbourhood, on the eastern foot of the old city mound. We know very little about Gaza’s archite…

Gazavat-name (ghazavāt-nāme, sing., gaza-name/ghazā-nāme) is a generic term (cf. Ar. maghāzī) used in Ottoman Turkish for accounts of military activity at varying levels, on land and at sea. Although gazavat-name can be translated as “book of holy wars/raids,” this is a narrow definition applicable in its literal sense primarily to early warfare against Christian opponents in the Balkans. More broadly, texts in this genre comprise works under various headings, including feth or fetih-name ( fetḥ, fetḥ-nāme, lit., conquest, book of conquest), zafer-name ( ẓafer-nāme, book of vi…

The first Azerbaijani qəzəls appear in the eighth/fourteenth or perhaps at the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, such as those written by Həsənoğlu (fl. seventh/thirteenth century). By then, the term qəzəl was already firmly established in its two main genres: the semantic (love poetry), and the formal (a genre of short əruz [əruz /Arabic ʿarūḍ] poetry with an “aa ba ca…” rhyme pattern). By this time qəzəls had been considerably extended from their original erotic basis, demonstrated by the religio-philosophical themes in Həsənoğlu’s extant works. However…