Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Muḥammad ʿAzīz al-Ḥabābī (Mohamed Aziz Lahbabi, 25 December 1923–23 August 1993) was a Moroccan writer and philosopher who established a personalist philosophy (shakhṣāniyya) in a Third World, Arabic, and Muslim context. He was one of the leading figures of modern philosophy in the Arab world during the era of decolonisation, having developed a new philosophical vocabulary and an intercultural hermeneutical approach to reconcile Third World societies and Islamic religious traditions with modernity. Central to his tho…

Ḥabāʾib (Ar. sing. ḥabīb; Indonesian sing. habib), which literally means the “beloveds,” is an honorific used to address and refer to the descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad ( sāda) in the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Arabia, Southeast Asia, and the Swahili coast of East Africa. In particular, the term is used to refer to the Bā ʿAlawī (Children of ʿAlawī), that is, a sāda lineage that traces its descent to ʿAlawī b. ʿUbaydallāh (d. at the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century), whose grandfather, Aḥmad b. ʿĪsā (d. 345/956) is said to have first migrated …

Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. ʿAbdallāh Ḥabash al-Ḥāsib al-Marwazī (fl. third/ninth century) was a brilliant mathematician (the name al-Ḥāsib means “the calculator”) and astronomer active during the period of the great blossoming of the sciences under the patronage of the ʿAbbāsids. Born in Merv, he lived in Baghdad, Damascus, and Samarrāʾ (sometime after the founding of the city in 221/836) during the reigns of the ʿAbbāsid caliphs al-Maʾmūn (198–218/813–33) and al-Muʿtaṣim (218–27/833–42). According to Ibn al-Nadīm ( al-Fihrist, 275), he lived to an age of more than a hundred, …

Ḥabīballāh (Ḥabībullāh) Khān (1872–1919) was son of the amīr ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (r. 1880–1901) and a slave girl from the court of Jahāndār Shāh, the mīr (amīr) of Badakhshān (r. 1864–9). He succeeded ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and ruled Afghanistan from 3 October 1901 to 20 February 1919, when he was assassinated at Kalla-gūsh, in Laghmān. Ḥabīballāh Khān inherited a functioning administrative and military system. His first official communications indicated the young amīr’s intention to continue the isolationist policies of his father: In order to shield his country from foreign…

Ḥabīb b. Maslama al-Fihrī, a brilliant general and close ally of the caliph Muʿāwiya, belonged to the Quraysh tribe, more precisely, to the Muḥārib b. Fihr branch of Quraysh. He played a major role in the conquest of the Jazīra and Armenia. His raids on Byzantine territory earned him the nickname Ḥabīb al-Rūm, “Ḥabīb of the Byzantines,” which can also be understood, ironically, as “the beloved one of the Byzantines.” The agreements of capitulation that he concluded with the people of Tiflīs (Tbilis…

Habsi (Ḥabsī)/Hasbi (Ḥasbī), Gedizli or Geduzi (Gedūzī, “of Geduz”) was a pen name of an Ottoman poet (d. after 960/1553) whose real name, date of birth, and year of death are unknown. He was born in Geduz (Gediz), in the principality of Germiyan (Kütahya), where he received his medrese (madrasa) education. After moving to Istanbul, where his elder brother, the better-known poet Keşfi (Keşfī), had been living for years, he first wrote poems under the pen name Habsi. The available biographical data introduce him as a tragic figure. Spending muc…

Hacı Bayram-ı Veli (Ḥāccī Bayrām-ı Velī) (749?-833/1348?-1430) was the founder of the (Bayrāmī) tarika ( ṭarīqa, lit., “way,” i.e., Ṣūfī order), which inspired the later (Melāmī) order (formed shortly after Hacı Bayram’s death, and whose members have worn since the origin the normal clothes of their day, and are followers of the doctrine of the “oneness of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd) going back to the teachings of the famous mystic of Andalusian origin Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240 in Damscus). There are no extant sources from his period that refer to him, and w…

Hacı Halil Paşa (Ḥācī Khalīl Paşa, c. 1065–1145/1655–1733) served as grand vizier of the Ottoman empire from Ramazan (Ramaḍān) 1128/August 1716 until Ramazan 1129/August 1717 and oversaw the loss of key strategic positions in Southeast Europe to the Habsburg dynasty of Austria. Halil Paşa was of Albanian origin and built his career as member of the bostancı (būstāncī, member of the Imperial guards) corps), rising to the post of bostancıbaşı ( bostānci başı, head of the Imperial guards) in 1123/1711. Despite being officially appointed the beylerbeyi ( beglerbegi, governor-general) …

Fuʾād Ḥaddād (1927–85) was a poet who wrote in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Born in Cairo to a Lebanese father, he was well versed in Classical Arabic and the colloquial traditions and was educated in French. He was instrumental in the birth of shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyya al-miṣriyya, a movement of poetry in the Egyptian colloquial dialect that veered away from the poetics of zajal, a traditional form of colloquial verse, and moved towards that of the contemporaneous modernist Arabic poetry. Ṣalāḥ Jāhīn (d. 1986), another pioneer of shiʿr al-ʿāmmiyya, whose first anthology was published in …

Al-Ṭāhir al-Ḥaddād (1899–1935) was a traditionally educated trade unionist and women’s-rights activist best known for his work in the latter field during the French protectorate in Tunisia (1881–1956). “Woman is the mother of humankind,” reads the first sentence of his 1930 book Imraʾatunā fī l-sharīʿa wa-l-mujtamaʿ (“Our woman in sharīʿa and society”; al-Ḥaddād, Imraʾatunā, 13). With these words, revealing both his concern for defending the role of women in public life and his debt to patriarchal views of women as childrearers, he began what beca…

Ha Decheng (哈德誠, Islamic name Hilāl al-Dīn, 1888–1943) was a Chinese-speaking Muslim (Hui) reformer and scholar-educator, originally from Shaanxi Province. He received both a Confucian and an Islamic education. When his father died, he assumed his position as imām of the Zhejiang Road Mosque in Shanghai. In 1913, he established the Xiexing import-export company with other Muslim entrepreneurs from Shanghai, seeing this as an opportunity to raise funds for reformist Muslim education and the Islamic revival movement. Ha acted as the m…

Hadice Turhan Sultan (Khadīja ṭurkhān Sulṭān) (d. 10 Şaban (Shaʿbān) 1094/4 August 1683) was the favourite consort, or haseki (khāṣekī), of the Ottoman sultan İbrahim (İbrāhīm) I (r. 1049–58/1640–8) and the mother of Sultan Mehmed (Meḥmed) IV (r. 1058–99/1648–87). There are no records of her early life prior to entering the Ottoman harem, but she was most likely captured during a slave raid into the Russian steppes and entered the harem of Sultan İbrahim in 1049/1640, when she was approximately twelve years old. A…

Hadım Mesih Mehmed Paşa (Khādim Mesīḥ Meḥmed, c. 901–98/c. 1495–1589) was an Ottoman grand vizier during the reign of Sultan Murad III (Murād, r. 982–1003/1574–95). He was Bosnian and was made a eunuch when he was placed in the palace, where later he served as the sultan’s treasurer. He served as an ak ağa ( aq agha, white eunuch) in the sultan’s household, one of approximately forty white eunuchs serving in the palace in the early tenth/sixteenth century. They were supervised by the kapı ağası ( kāpī aghası, chief white eunuch), who was a close advisor to the sultan and controlled access to the e…

Hadim Süleyman (Khādim Süleymān) Paşa (c. 861–954/1457–1547) was an Ottoman admiral and statesman under Sultan Süleyman (Süleymān) I (r. 926–74/1520–66). The sobriquet hadim ( khādim, literally, “servant”) indicates that he was a palace eunuch. Most available sources claim that he was Macar ( Mācār, Hungarian), although he would have been enslaved and castrated before the Ottoman absorption of southern Hungary in 948/1541. He may have been captured from forces allied with the Habsburg Empire during the conquests of Mehmed (Meḥmed) II (r.…

Ḥadīth (Ar. lit., speech, narrative, pl. aḥādīth) is the technical term for Muslim Tradition about the exemplary practice of the prophet Muḥammad, enshrined in his words (aqwāl, sing. qawl) and deeds (afʿāl, sing. fiʿl) and his tacit approval (taqrīr) of his Companions’ words and deeds (for a more detailed nomenclature, see al-Ḥākim, Madkhal, 81). Ḥadīth is also each individual tradition about what the Prophet said, did, or tacitly approved. In contrast to the ontological status of the Qurʾān as God’s uncreated (qadīm) speech, ḥadīth—the substantive form of the adjective “new”…

Ḥadīth commentary (sharḥ al-ḥadīth, pl. shurūḥ al-ḥadīth, or, more rarely, tafsīr al-ḥadīth or taʾwīl al-ḥadīth) is the practice of interpreting a report or a collection of reports attributed to Muḥammad, his Companions, exemplars amongst the early generations of Muslims, or, for Shīʿīs, the Imāms. Construed broadly, the term could include any formal or informal oral or written gloss on a given ḥadīth. Narrowly defined, the practice of ḥadīth commentary refers to a cumulative and transregional tradition of line-by-line Muslim scholarly exegesis on individual ḥadīth and ḥadīth co…

In ḥadīth criticism the discipline of al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl (impugning and accrediting) is aimed at evaluating the uprightness ( ʿadāla) of transmitters ( rijāl, lit. “men”) populating the chains of transmission ( isnād, pl. asānīd) of Muslim traditions ( ḥadīth, pl. aḥādīth). If the isnād is the genealogical tree of ḥadīth, then the evaluation of transmitters can be seen as an extension into the science of ḥadīth of the traditional genealogical pursuits of the Arabs, with added legal, theological, sectarian, political, literary, and ethnic concerns. Closely re…

Like other Muslims, Ibāḍīs have long employed ḥadīth (in the general sense of what was related about the Prophet and his community) in seeking to understand how Islam should be understood and practised (Wilkinson, Ibāḍism, 126). Up to the sixth/twelfth century, however, Ibāḍīs preserved attitudes towards ḥadīth that, on the one hand, remained closer to earlier Islamic approaches to it, but, on the other hand, increasingly diverged from Sunnī and later Shīʿī norms concerning ḥadīth. Since the sixth/twelfth century, Ibāḍīs have progressively adopted Sunnī standards for ḥadīth. This…

Ḥadīth qudsī (plur. aḥādīth qudsiyya, lit., holy tradition; also ḥadīth ilāhī, ḥadīth rabbānī, plur. aḥādīth ilāhiyya/rabbāniyya, lit., divine tradition; khabar, report, plur. akhbār, sometimes used instead of ḥadīth) designates a direct-discourse statement ascribed to God—hence the preferred translation “divine saying”—that is not from the Qurʾān but is reported normally in ḥadīth format, with supporting isnād (chain of transmitters), on the authority of the prophet Muḥammad. A divine saying is distinguished formally from a Qurʾānic revelation and…

The Hadiyya of Ethiopia was a political entity belonging to the Muslim federation of Adal and inhabiting a large territory in southeastern Ethiopia between the seventh/thirteenth and the tenth/sixteenth centuries. The Hadiyya consisted of Cushitic- and Semitic-speaking ethnic groups who shared several cultural features, such as a strong Islamic influence and an agropastoralist economy. The groups that are presently labelled Hadiyya proper are part of the Highland East Cushitic cluster and are relat…