Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Ṣalāḥ Labakī (d. 1955) was a prominent figure in the literary and political life of Lebanon during the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in 1906 in São Paulo, Brazil, where his father, Naʿūm Labakī, was a leading journalist in the local Arabic-language press. The family returned to Lebanon in 1908. After qualifying as a lawyer in 1930, Ṣalāḥ Labakī became active in literature, journalism, and politics. He was a member of the Syrian National Social Party, serving as the personal assistant to its leader…

Ladakh (Ladākh) is a region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, bordering on Tibet, the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan [Illustration 1]. Until 1834 it was an independent kingdom. The spoken language is closely related to Tibetan. Surviving Buddhist rock sculptures dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries C.E. testify to religious and artistic influence from Kashmir. In later centuries, all the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism established monaste…

Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Lādhiqī (d. c.900/1495) was one of the most important music theorists of the late ninth/fifteenth century. He wrote two significant treatises in Arabic, the first of which, Zayn al-alḥān (“The embellishment of melodies”), was completed by 888/1483 (and subsequently translated by the author into Turkish). The similar but slightly fuller al-Risāla al-fatḥiyya (“The victory epistle”) was written shortly thereafter and was likewise dedicated to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II (Bāyezīd II, r. 886–918/1481–1512). In both treatis…

Ladkar (sg. dhikr, “recalling”) refers to ritual songs of a sacred nature in the Tashlhiyt speaking part of the Moroccan Atlas (the western and central part of the High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas, and the Sūs plain). The verses of these songs are delivered in a combination of Tashlhiyt and Arabic. They are performed without musical instruments by elderly men or women on various occasions relating to the religious calendar and the life of rural communities. On certain religious holidays, men returning from mosques will sing specific ladkar while stopping at certain places of local impo…

Lafẓ (linguistic expression, utterance) and maʿnā (meaning, signification) are terms in which linguists as well as scholars in other Islamic disciplines have described language, beginning with Sībawayh (d. c.180/796) in his famous Kitāb, the oldest extant treatise on Arabic grammar (on Sībawayh, see Carter). In the fourth chapter of his Kitāb, Sībawayh draws attention to the various ways in which expression and meaning may be related: each distinct expression can have a specific meaning; one expression may possess several meanings (homonymy); a…

The Lakhm were a Qaḥṭānī Arab tribe of southern Syria closely connected to the Judhām and ʿĀmila. According to the traditional genealogy, the eponym Lakhm was of Qaḥṭānī origin and the brother of Judhām and ʿĀmila, although some argued that the tribe was actually from the Nizār (Caskel, 2:53–6; Ibn Durayd, 225–7). In historical times, these three “sister tribes” were political allies and occupied the same region in southern Syria. The Lakhm were considered the most ancient and illustrious of the …

The Laks are an indigenous people of the mountainous part of Dagestan, in the Northern Caucasus. Ancient Greek authors (Herodotus 7.72, Strabo 11.5.1, Plutarch, Pompey, 35) mentioned the Ligyes (Λίγυες), Legaes (Λήγας), and Leges (Λήγες), who are supposed to be the ancestors of Laks as well as of the Lezgis and some other peoples of Dagestan. The capital of Lakia, the historical land of the Laks, is Kumukh (Ar. Ghumīk), so the Laks are known also as Kazi-Kumukhs. In the sixth century C.E., Kumukh was incorporated into the Sāsānid empire. The ruling dynasty became related …

Laʾl (also Lāl, fl. 988–1014/1580–1605) was an important and prolific artist in the workshops of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–1605), contributing illustrations to most major imperial manuscript projects. His name, a single word as was customary, indicates that he was Hindu, as were many of his colleagues in the imperial workshops. We know no further details of his early life. He was the father of Kishendas, a minor artist and workshop administrator (Seyller, Scribal notes, 275). Laʾl’s importance in Akbar’s workshops is clearly stated in the Āʾīn-i Akbarī (“Annals of …

Abū l-Qāsim Hibatallāh b. al-Ḥasan b. Manṣūr al-Rāzī al-Ṭabarī al-Lālakāʾī (d. Tuesday 6 Ramaḍān 418/10 October 1027) was an expert in ḥadīth and the Shāfiʿī school of Islamic law. His nisba, al-Lālakāʾī (the variants al-Lālikāʾī, al-Alkaʾī, and al-Alkāyī are also mentioned in the biographical sources), means “the cobbler.” This name derives from the Persian lālak or lālakā, meaning “slippers” or “one-sized footwear” (Dozy, 2:516). As there is a dearth of details about al-Lālakāʾī’s biography, it is unknown whether he ever made his living from shoema…

Lala Mustafa (Lālā Muṣṭafā) Paşa (d. 988/1580) was a tenth-/sixteenth-century Ottoman vizier and military commander. He was born in the Bosnian village of Soqol (on an unknown date) and admitted to the Sultan’s court thanks to his influential family connections. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the Ottoman hierarchy, but incurred the disfavour of the grand vizier Rustem (Rūstem) Paşa (d. 968/1561) in 962/1555. He was associated with the entourage of Süleyman (Süleymān) I’s (r. 926–74/1520–66) most probable successor Bayezid (Bāyezīd, 931–69/1525–61) and was appointed lala ( lāl…

Lala Şahin (Lālā Şāhīn) Paşa (d. 788/1386?) was tutor ( lala) to the Ottoman sultan Murad (Murād) I (763–91/1362–89) and the first person in the Ottoman state to hold the title of beylerbey ( beglerbegi, lit. “lord of lords,” in this period, commander-in-chief of the army; in later usage, governor general). Apparently, Şahin was a convert to Islam, and, according to Taşköprülüzade (Taşköprülüzāde (also Taşköprüzade, Taşköprizade), d. 968/1561), a manumitted slave of Sultan Orhan (Orkhān, r. c.724–63/1324–62). Circa 760/1359, Orh…

Lālla Awīsh al-Majdhūba was a waliyya ṣāliḥa (virtuous saint) whose nicknames and oral histories help explain the rituals that are performed at her sanctuary in Assoual, in the medina of Marrakech. The local historian Ibn al-Muwaqqit (fl. ninth/fifteenth-century) mentions Lālla Awīsh al-Majdhūba in his al-Saʿāda al-abadiyya (“Eternal happiness”), but he gives no birth or death date. He relates a short story about a poor man whom she transported miraculously from Mecca to Marrakech, together with her sheep, and says that she travelled to and from Mecca daily. Her run-down zāwiya (san…

Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. al-Mubārak b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Sijilmāsī al-Lamaṭī (d. 1156/1743) was a religious scholar. Born in Sijilmāsa, Morocco, in about 1090/1679, he settled in Fez in 1110/1698–9 and died there on 12 Jumādā I 1156/4 July 1743, after acquiring the title of shaykh al-jamāʿa (master of the community of scholars) granted to the dean of professors (Ibn Sūda, 141). In his youth he attended courses led by his maternal cousin Aḥmad al-Ḥabīb al-Sijilmāsī al-Lamaṭī (d. 1165/1751–2), who was later renowned for his holiness (Lévi-Provençal, 309). One of his first masters in F…

Hüseyin Lamekani (Ḥüseyin Lāmekānī, d. 1035/1625) was a şeyh (shaykh) of the heterodox Melami (Melāmī) branch of the Bayrami (Bayrāmi) dervish order, and a Ṣūfī author and poet. He is generally credited with the mitigation of animosity towards the order on the part of the Ottoman state and religious authorities, and the reconciliation with them, after the notorious persecution of the Melami-Bayrami heterodox protagonists İsmail Maşuki (İsmāʿīl Maʿshūqī, d. 935/1528–9), Hüsamettin Ankarevi (Ḥüsām al-Dīn A…

Aḥmad b. Muhammad b. Nāṣir al-Lamkī (1929–97), a prominent member of the Omani community in Zanzibar, was a political activist, newspaper editor, and ambassador. He was born in Zanzibar to a wealthy Omani family and was sent to Cairo at the age of ten to pursue his education. He resided in Cairo between 1939 and 1951, worked for Radio Cairo, and spent the last two years in prison for his anti-British and anti-monarchy activities. He then moved to London where he co-founded the Association of Zanzibar…

Edward William Lane (1801–76) was a British scholar of modern Egypt, translator of the Arabian nights, and lexicographer of the Arabic language [Illustration 1]. Originally apprenticed as an engraver, Lane did not pursue engraving as a career although his artistic training served him well in his early scholarly work. Instead, his imagination was captured by Egypt in 1821 when he attended the sensational exhibition of Giovanni Battista Belzoni (d. 1823) in Piccadilly, London. Belzoni’s exhibition was about the …

Laqīṭ b. Yaʿmur (or b. Yaʿmar, Maʿbad, Maʿmar, or Bakr) b. Khārija was a pre-Islamic Arab poet who lived in the sixth century C.E. He was a member of the Iyād, a tribe who were once settled in the Tihāma region, south of Mecca. Due to the barrenness of the soil they were forced to leave their territory and went to Iraq, where they settled in the Sawād, the region between Kufa and Basra, mainly in the city of al-Ḥīra. Here Laqīṭ came into contact with urban Arab culture as well as the Persian langu…

Laqīṭ b. Zurāra al-Dārimī (fl. second half of the sixth century C.E.), also known as Abū Nahshal or Abū Dakhtanūs, was a pre-Islamic poet and chief ( sayyid) of his tribe. His name is closely linked with several Arab battle-days ( ayyām, sing. yawm). In addition to the rather obscure Yawm Tarj, during which he was captured by al-Kumayt b. Ḥanẓala, there is the well-known Yawm Raḥraḥān, when his father, Zurāra, was killed and his brother Maʿbad captured by a group of the ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa tribe. Laqīṭ offered a maximum ransom of two hundre…

Larbi Ben Sari (al-ʿArbī b. Ṣārī, b. c.1870, d. 1964), often known by the honorific Shaykh al-ʿArbī (Cheikh Larbi), was the leading performer of the classical Arab-Andalusian musical tradition in the western Algerian city of Tlemcen during the twentieth century. Inheritor of a vast instrumental and vocal repertoire transmitted, through the end of the nineteenth century, by word of mouth and through manuscript collections of poetic texts, Cheikh Larbi played a key role in defining, conserving, and …

Raḍī l-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ghafūr Lārī (d. 5 Shaʿbān 912/21 December 1506) was a Ṣūfī author affiliated with the Naqshbandiyya and a major disciple, commentator, and biographer of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492). Despite his acknowledged reputation in the Herat intellectual circles of his time—demonstrated by notable contemporary figures referring to him in their writings—little is known about Lārī’s life. He was born in the city of Lār, in Fārs, and an oral tradition contained in the Rashaḥāt ʿayn al-ḥayāt (“Trickles from the fountain of life,” in Persian) by Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī…