Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

The khānate of Kalāt existed on the borderlands of India and Iran until its merger with Pakistan in 1955. It emerged in the eleventh/seventeenth century, when a declining Ṣafavid empire to the west and weakening Mughal rule to the east created a power vacuum that later facilitated the emergence of several polities in the area. 1. Early history The khānate was formally established by Aḥmad Khān (r. 1077–1107/1666–95) as a loose federation of the Brahui (Brahūī) tribes of the Kalāt highlands in 1077/1666. The origins of the Brahui and the processes that …

Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Kalbāsī (or Karbāsī, 1179–1262/1766–1845) was amongst the most prominent Shīʿī scholars in the world and was central to the neo-Uṣūlī network in Iran. Neo-Uṣūlism has been the most powerful socio-intellectual movement in the Shīʿī world since the twelfth/eighteenth century and is rooted in the rationalist school of Shīʿī law. Kalbāsī helped consolidate the international Shīʿī community in the hands of Uṣūlīs, who persecuted Akhbārīs, Ṣūfīs, and others as a result of ideological di…

Kalb b. Wabara was a major Arabian lineage group of the Quḍāʿa. Predominantly camel-breeding pastoralists, the Kalb constituted powerful clans in the deserts between Syria and Iraq in pre-Islamic times, and were a key power-broking faction in the Umayyad era. Their lands were strategically significant: from their base in the ancient cult centre of Dūmat al-Jandal, the Kalb controlled the Wādī Sirḥān access route between Syria and central Arabia; they also occupied the Samāwa desert west of al-Ḥīra…

The kalgay ( qālghāy, qālgha, and other forms, from Turk. qāghılghāy, lit., the one who is to be installed) was the deputy and heir-designate of a ruler in the Crimean and Bukharan khānates (V. V. Barthol’d, Kalga, in his Sochinenia, 1963–77, 5:537). This post had no precedent in the political culture of the Turco-Mongolian steppe, which sometimes permitted the selection of successors by seniority but most often by tanistry (in which, in Turco-Mongolian tradition, the ablest claimant killed all others). The kalgay represents an attempt to adopt the Islamic heir-apparent inst…

Sunan Kalijaga, a figure of great popular significance, is the most important of the nine walī (wali sanga) who are believed to have been the founders of Islam on Java. The earliest primary source that recounts the life and activities of Kalijaga is the Babad Tanah Jawi (“Chronicle of the Land of Java”), a genealogical narrative that recounts the succession of the rulers of Java, initially compiled in the eleventh/seventeenth century from oral sources at the Kartasura court, the capital of the sultanate of Mataram. According to this Babad, Kalijaga was born at the end of the reign …

Kalīla wa-Dimna is a collection of didactic and humorous fables whose central characters are two jackals, Kalīla and Dimna. Moralistic and often considered instructional “mirrors for princes,” these tales also contain ribald humour and unforgettable accounts of the foibles of human beings (and animals who behave like humans). Their stories of animal and human nature appealed to diverse populations—princely and common, wealthy and middle class, from India to Iran to France. Adapted and translated …

Shāh Kalīmallāh Shāhjahānābādī (1060–1142/1650–1729) was amongst the most influential Ṣūfīs of late Mughal India. He is popularly considered to have initiated the renaissance of the Chishtī Niẓāmī brotherhood (the Chishtiyya was founded in Chisht, a small town near Herat, in about 318/930 by Abū Isḥāq Shāmī, the “Syrian,” d. 328/940, and introduced into India by Muʿīn al-Dīn Sijzī, d. 627/1230. From the ninth/fifteenth and the twelfth/eighteenth centuries on, respectively, two main branches develo…

Abū Ṭālib Kalīm Kāshānī (b. c.990–4/1582–6, d. 15 Dhū l-Ḥijja 1061/29 November 1651) was a Persian poet and an exponent of the Indian style (sabk-i hindī), which was ornate and rhetorical, with elaborate abstract figurative language. Kalīm was born in Hamadān but soon moved to Kāshān, hence his nisbas Kāshānī and Hamadānī. He studied at Kāshān and Shiraz before going to the Deccan (c.1010/1603) to seek his fortune at the Indian Mughal court. Although Kalīm did not enter the court, he became friends with Shāhnavāz Khān of Shiraz (d. 1020/1611)…

Abū l-Khaṭṭāb Maḥfūẓ b. Aḥmad b. al-Ḥasan al-Kalwadhānī (2 Shawwāl 432–23 Jumādā II 510/5 June 1041–2 November 1116) was a Ḥanbalī jurist and one of the most important early authorities of the Ḥanbalī legal school. He apparently spent his life in Baghdad and was a student of the renowned Ḥanbalī judge Abū Yaʿlā Ibn al-Farrāʾ (d. 458/1066), with whom he studied the majority opinions of Ḥanbalī jurisprudence (al-madhhab), legal theory, and disputed legal points ( khilāf). He was also an authority on inheritance law, which he studied with the jurist Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Ḥusay…

Kalyana (Kalyāna, Kalyān, Kalyāni) was an historic town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka (latitude N 17.52°, longitude E 76.57°), known today as Basavakalyana in honour of the Virashaiva social reformer Basava (d. 1167 C.E.) who lived there in the mid-twelfth century C.E. The city served as the capital of the Chalukya dynasty, whose kings ruled the entire Deccan region between the eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries C.E. During the Chalukya era, the geographic and main ritual centre of t…

Kamāl al-Dīn Iṣfahānī (b. c. 568/ 1172, d. 635/1237) was a panegyrist of seventh/thirteenth-century Isfahan, nicknamed Khallāq al-Maʿānī (“creator of ideas,” i.e., a creative artist). 1. Life Kamāl al-Dīn was the son of the celebrated poet Jamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Iṣfahānī (d. before 599/1202). He began to write poetry at the age of just fourteen and gained fame with an elegy (marthiya) composed for his father’s death, when he was scarcely twenty years old. He sought the patronage of Rukn al-Dīn Abū l-ʿAlāʾ Ṣāʿid (d. 600/1203–4) who had also been his father…

Ḥaydar ʿAlī Kamālī (b. Abarkūh, 1869, d. Tehran, 1936), was a poet, novelist, and critic affiliated with the Iranian constitutionalist movement, which existed from 1905 to 1907 and led to the establishment of a parliament under the Qajar dynasty (r. 1789–1925). He was illiterate until the age of twenty-three and worked as a seller of glassware, but he then began to write poetry, and his talent paved his way to membership in the literary circle of Isfahan. He later moved to Tehran, where he met the…

Kamaniçe (in Ottoman orthography, Qamānīçe; Ukr. Kam’yanets’ Podil’s’kıj; Pol. Kamieniec Podolski) is a town in the Podolia region of present-day Ukraine, which traces its origins to a medieval Ruthenian fort that was conquered by the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century. After the internal crisis in the Golden Horde in the mid-1300s, it became the centre of a principality ruled by a Lithuanian dynasty and a bone of contention between Lithuania and Poland. From the fourteenth century, the town …

Al-Kāmiliyya was a Shīʿī sect that emerged in the aftermath of the First Civil War (35–40/656–61). During the first centuries of Islam, the claims to leadership ( imāma) raised by the Shīʿa—supporters of the descendants of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (r. 35–40/656–61), the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and Fāṭima (d. 11/632), the Prophet’s daughter, and of their political and religious right to rule—gave rise to a wide range of opinions and religious sects. Starting in the fourth/tenth century, heresiographers record the ephemer…

Kāmil Khvārazmī (Uzbek, Komil Khorazmiy, 1825–99) was a scribe, statesman, translator, musician, poet, and an acknowledged exponent of nineteenth-century Central Asian Turkish (Chaghatay) literary tradition. His original name was Pahlavān Muḥammad Niyāz ʿAbdallāh Ākhundoghli. Born to a family of intellectuals in Khiwa, he was educated in the traditional madrasa system. He became well versed in both Persian and Central Asian Turkish literature and began to compose poetry and music at an early age. He was employed as a court scribe during the r…

Kāmrān Shāh Durrānī was son of the Sadūzāy ruler Shāh Maḥmūd (r. in Kabul 1801 to c.1804 and 1809–18 and in Herat 1818–29; d. c.1828–30). Kāmrān deposed Shāh Maḥmūd in the summer of 1826 and ruled Herat until his violent death in about 1841–2. Kāmrān’s career unfolded during the decline of the Sadūzāy empire (r. 1747–1842), which coincided with the intense rivalry between the two Sadūzāy factions, headed by Shāh Maḥmūd and his half-brother Shāh Shujāʿ (r. c.1804–9), respectively. Pāyanda Khān (d. c.1799–1801), Fatḥ Khān (d. 1818), and Dūs…

Ghassān Kanafānī (1936–72) was a Palestinian editor, journalist, writer, and activist. With his short stories, novels, and plays he is considered one of the most eminent Palestinian writers of the twentieth century (Pannewick, 613). At the same time, he was a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the co-founder and editor of its magazine al-Hadaf (“The target”). As a close friend and associate of George Habash (d. 2008), the founder of the PFLP, he changed his political convictions from pan-Arab nationalism to a mo…

Kanʿān is the name usually given by post-Qurʾānic Islamic traditions and literature to the son of Noah who was left behind and drowned in the Flood. The name is attested in early Qurʾānic commentaries (cf. Muqātil, 2:283–4), although a few sources maintain that his name was actually Yām. The Qurʾān does not name such a son but alludes to him in a few verses: “And Noah called to his son, who was standing apart, ‘Embark with us, my son, and be thou not with the unbelievers!’ He said, ‘I will take …

Muḥammad al-Amīn b. Muḥammad al-Kānimī (locally al-Kānemī, c. 1775–1837) became de facto ruler of Borno as a result of his military and scholarly interventions in defence of that kingdom against the jihād of Shaykh ʿUthmān b. Muḥammad Fūdī (d. 1817), teacher, writer, religious activist, and founder of the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903). Following his studies in Murzuk (his birthplace, an oasis town in present-day southwestern Libya), Tripoli, and Birni Gazargamo (the Borno capital, in present-day northeastern Nigeria), and havi…

Kannauj (Skr. Kānyakubja, known to Arabic and Persian geographers as Qannawj or Qinnawj) is a historic city of North India on the banks of the Ganges River, in the present-day state of Uttar Pradesh. 1. Early history and Muslim presence Kannauj first became a major political centre when its king, Harṣa (r. c.606–47 C.E.), made it his capital. From the early ninth to early eleventh century C.E. it was the capital of the Gurjara-Pratihāras, an Indian kingdom referred to in Muslim sources as al-Jurz, which was the preeminent power in Nor…