Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Sayyid Aḥmad Kasravī Tabrīzī was a towering Iranian nationalist, historian, and intellectual-reformer who was active in the first half of the twentieth century. He was primarily concerned with educating Iranians and thus he was not so involved in the political process during the reign of Riḍā Shāh Pahlavī, although he was regarded as an advocate of truth and fearlessly opposed those whose activities he deemed as not in Iranian interests. Kasravī’s primary objective was to demonstrate to Iranians t…

Siyāvash Kasrāyī (b. 1926 in Isfahan, d. 1996 in Vienna) was an Iranian poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and political activist. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Tehran, where he received his early training from the Adab elementary school and the Madrasa-yi Niẓām, a military high school, before enrolling at the Dār al-Funūn (Academy of Applied Sciences). From 1947 to 1950 he studied law at the University of Tehran and became a supporter of the Marxist-Leninist party Ḥizb-i Tūda…

Nikolay Katanov (1862–1922) was a prominent Russian Turkologist of Khakas origin, known for his works in comparative linguistics, ethnography, and folklore. He was born into an Orthodox family, in the steppe region of Khakassia (in Siberia, in the Russian Empire). After finishing his studies at the Krasnoyarsk gymnasium in 1884, he entered the Faculty of Oriental Languages at Saint-Petersburg Imperial University, where he studied the Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, and Chagatai languages. In 1889, on the recommendation of the leading Turkologist Vasi…

Najm al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿUmar al-Kātibī (Dabīrān, in Persian) al-Qazwīnī (600–75/1204–76) was a major Islamic logician and philosopher. Two of his works, one on logic and the other on metaphysics and physics, continued to be studied in madrasas (colleges) in the Islamic world until the modern period. 1. Life His nisba al-Qazwīnī suggests that al-Kātibī was born in the Iranian town of Qazvīn. He studied with the philosopher Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 663/1265), as attested by al-Kātibī’s references to al-Abharī in his works and an extant manuscript …

Kātib (pl. kuttāb ), literally “writer,” refers before about 905/1500 to members of those occupational groups that were involved in writing letters and documents. Some of them worked in the streets or mosques, offering their services to the general public. Others were engaged as private secretaries in the service of the political and economic elite. Specifically, however, the term kātib refers to the scribes of the state administration. They occupied various layers of the bureaucracy, from the lowest clerks to the highest representatives, the heads of the various dawāwīn (bureaus).…

Katsina, a walled city and an amīrate, has been, since the eighth/fourteenth century, a major military and mercantile centre on the northwestern frontier of Hausaland’s plains in present-day northern Nigeria. Located on the “shore” (sahel) between the Sahara to the north and the non-Muslim communitites in the woodlands to the south, the city of Katsina served as a safe “harbour” for caravans from or to North Africa. The caravan merchants who settled in Katsina were often also Islamic scholars, and many were linked to the scholar…

Kauman (or pakauman), a Javanese term derived from the Arabic qawm (a people) and meaning “place for kaum (here: religious functionaries),” denotes the ward in major towns of Central and East Java in which the principal mosque of a district is located and religious functionaries reside. The earliest kauman is found in Demak, on the northern coast of Central Java, where the first Javanese Muslim kingdom emerged in the early tenth/sixteenth century. Later, the kauman in the capital of the susuhunate (hereditary ruling power) of Surakarta became clearly demarcated as the locat…

The Kawāhla in northern Kordofan are one of the large Arab camel-breeding tribes of the Sudan. The area in which most spend the dry season extends from Sodiri (latitude N 14°25’, longitude E 29°05’) to the Darfur border. They numbered approximately 85,000 in 2010. The Kawāhla in the Sudan fall into seven groups: 1) a small pastoral group on the river Atbara; 2) a small group near Kassala; 3) those living between the Blue Nile and the rivers Dinder and Rahad; 4) those living near al-Manāqil, in the Gezira; 5) cattle-herding Kawāhla in the …

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī (1855–1902) was a leader of the Islamic reformist trend in late Ottoman Aleppo, an early precursor of the modernist Salafiyya and of Arab nationalism. He belonged to a notable family of Sharīfian descent (that is, descendants of the prophet Muḥammad), with branches in Istanbul and Aleppo. His branch resided in Aleppo’s mixed Muslim-Christian Jallūm quarter, where some family members acted as administrators of the ancient family mosque and Ṣūfī lodge (zāwiya). His father, Aḥmad Bahāʾī al-Kawākibī (1829–82), a staunch supporter of the Ottoman…

Kawār (Kawar) is a string of oases in the northeastern corner of present-day Niger, the largest being Bilma. It played a central role in two trading networks, the trans-Saharan route from Lake Chad to Tripoli, and the regional salt trade from Kawār to the desert-edge regions to the south. Kawār consists of a group of about ten villages extending about eighty kilometres north-south and less than five kilometres east-west. Its population, historically about 3,000 (5,500 in 1965), consists of Kanuri people in the southern villages and Teda (Toubou) in the northern. Kawār appears in media…

Al-kawthar (the Abundant) is the name given to sūra 108 of the Qurʾān, the shortest and, according to several scholars, one of the earliest sūras to have been revealed to Muḥammad (Nöldeke, 92; Neuwirth, 45). The sūra was celebrated by Muslim exegetes for its literary quality (al-Rāzī, 32:117–21) and even its miraculous properties (al-Biqāʿī, 8:550–1). The sūra’s name derives from its first verse, “We have given you al-kawthar.” The adjective kawthar (abundant), which occurs only once in the Qurʾān, is found in pre-Islamic poetry, where it refers metonymically to …

Kayalpatnam (Tamil Nadu state, India, latitude N 8°34’, longitude E 78°8’), the “city of Kayal” renowned for maritime trade, is now a small town almost entirely inhabited by Muslims who differ in complexion from their Tamil neighbours and claim, with some justification, to be of Middle Eastern origin. Like their ancestors, they are involved in world-wide commerce focused mainly on precious stones and metals. 1. History The town is the site of the celebrated port of Kayal or Qāʾil (Coil on some old European maps) on the coast of the Mannar Gulf. The port was vi…

Osman Cemal Kaygılı (ʿOthmān Cemāl, b. 19 Safer (Ṣafar) 1308/4 October 1890, d. 9 January 1945), a Turkish author, poet, and playwright, was born into modest circumstances in the Otakçılar district of Istanbul. Early in his childhood, he lost his father and was raised by his mother with the help of relatives. He graduated from the Menşe-i Küttab-ı Askeriye (Menşeʾ-i Küttāb-i ʿAskeriyye, a school that trained clerical personnel for the army) and began working as a secretary in the military in 1323–…

Kay Kāʾūs b. Iskandar b. Qābūs b. Vushmgīr, ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī (b. c.412/1021–2, r. 441-c.480/1049-c.1087), belonged to the Ziyārid dynasty, which ruled, with varying autonomy, in the Caspian provinces of Ṭabaristān and Gurgān from about 319/931 to about 483/1090. Describing himself as mawlā-yi amīr al-muʾminīn (“lord and commander of the believers”) ( QN, 3), Amīr Kay Kāʾūs ascended the throne in 441/1049, at a time when much of his territory had come under the suzerainty of the Saljūqs, who ruled Persia, Iraq, and Syria from 431/1040 to 590/1194…

Al-Kaysāniyya was a Shīʿī sect that arose from the revolt led by the freedman al-Mukhtār b. Abī ʿUbayd al-Thaqafī (d. 67/687) in Kufa in 66/686. This was the first Shīʿī movement to give expression to the messianic belief that its leader, the legitimate ruler descending from the family of the Prophet, was not dead, but in concealment (ghayba). According to that belief, which would then be accepted and elaborated upon by all subsequent expressions of Shīʿism, the Hidden Imām would return to establish a regime of justice on earth. The historical context in which al-Kaysāniyya originat…

Kayserili Halil (Qayṣerili Khalīl) Paşa (c.977–1038/c.1570–1629), an Ottoman grand vizier and grand admiral, was born in the village of Zeytun (now Süleymanli), in the province of Kahramanmaraş. He was recruited into the devşirme ( devşīrme, the “collection” of boys from among Balkan and Anatolian Christian subjects) and received his education at the Enderun Mektebi (Enderūn Mektebi, Palace School). In 1014–5/1606, he was appointed çakırcıbaşı (chief falconer), a court position for prospective sancakbeyis ( sancaqbeği, administrator of a sub-district). On 4 Ramazan (…

Aḥmad al-Kayyāl (“the corn measurer”), also called Aḥmad Ibn al-Kayyāl, was a Shīʿī Ismāʿīlī missionary ( dāʿī, pl. duʿāt) working in Khurāsān and Transoxania (present-day Uzbekistan) during the first decades of the fourth/tenth century. Sources for his life and doctrines are scarce, allusive, and contradictory (De Smet, 138–61). According to the Bayān al-adyān (“The explanation of the religions”), a book about Muslim sects written in Persian in 485/1092 by the historian Abū l-Maʿālī, al-Kayyāl was a native of Bayhaq, a region east of Nīshāpūr. H…

The Kazakh khānate was a Chinggisid nomadic state that dominated the eastern Kipchak Steppe (modern-day Kazakhstan) in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries. Along with the Shībānid Uzbek khānate and the Crimean khānate, it was a successor state to the Jochid ulus (Vásáry, Golden Horde), the western Mongol state ruled by the descendants of Jochi (622/1225 or 624/1227), the eldest son of Chinggis Khān (r. 602–24/1206–27). 1. Origins: the Eastern Wing of the Ulus of Jochi The eastern realm of the Jochid ulus, which corresponds roughly to modern-day Kazakhstan,…

The Kazakhs (Qazaqs) are a Turkic-speaking people who emerged as a distinct nomadic group at the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century when the Jochid ulus (people) of the eastern Kipchak Steppe divided into the Kazakhs ( qazaq Uzbeks) and the Uzbeks (Shībānid Uzbeks). Like other Chinggisid ulus, such as the Chaghatays, the Jochid ulus had emerged from the fusion of the Mongols and various non-Mongol groups. 1. The historical meaning of the term qazaq The term qazaq denoted a fugitive, freebooter, or vagabond in post-Mongol Central Asia and the Kipchak Steppe. Although fo…

Kazakhstan is geographically the largest independent state in Central Asia. It takes its name from the Kazakhs (Qazaqs), a Turkic people with a nomadic past, and is home to numerous other peoples; it has been heavily influenced by Russian language and culture. Most inhabitants identify themselves as Muslim. Originally created as part of the USSR, it continues to be shaped by Soviet legacies but has also undergone substantial economic, demographic, social, and linguistic change since independence in 1991. 1. Territory and population With an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres,…