Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

The Maasina empire was a nineteenth-century West African imāmate. “Maasina” is the local name of the region where the empire first emerged, the Inland Delta Niger, a multi-ethnic area inhabited by Fulani herdsmen, Marka, Bambara, and Songhay agriculturalists and Bozo fishermen. Alternatively known as the Dina (from Ar., al-dīn, the religion, Islam) or caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (named for the newly founded capital), the Maasina empire extended, at its apogee, along the Niger River, from the Inland Delta to the Niger Bend, including the plains be…

Muḥammad al-Muṣṭafā l-Qalqamī (1831–1910), known as Māʾ al-ʿAynayn, was a leading Ṣūfī and anti-colonial resistance leader in Mauritania, the Western Sahara, and southern Morocco. He was also deeply involved in Moroccan politics in his later years. 1. Early life Māʾ al-ʿAynayn (lit., the water of two eyes, so called perhaps from his mother’s affection for him) was the son of Muḥammad Fāḍil b. Māmīn (al-Amīn) al-Qalqamī (d. 1869), who had founded the Fāḍiliyya Ṣūfī order, a branch of the Qādiriyya. The world-wide Qādiriyya order was a…

Maʿbad b. ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUkaym al-Juhanī (executed c.80/699) was a Basran religious thinker who was associated with the Qadarī doctrine of human free will (qadar). While he was ultimately condemned as a heretic, for a time he enjoyed a good reputation in Basra and was trusted by the Umayyad authorities. Al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf (d. 95/714), governor of the East, recommended him to the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 65–86/685–705) as an emissary to the Byzantine emperor. Maʿbad also tutored one of the caliph’s sons. He may also have…

Maʿbad b. Khālid Abū Zurʿa al-Juhanī (d. 72/691) was a relatively obscure Companion of the prophet Muḥammad who died in 72/691 at an advanced age of more than eighty years. He is remembered as an early convert to Islam and as one of the four men who carried the banner of the Banū Juhayna on the day of Mecca’s surrender to Muḥammad in 10/632. Ibn Saʿd (d. 230/845) notes that he accompanied the Companion Kurz b. Jābir al-Fihrī (d. 10/632) on his expedition against those who stole the Prophet’s milch ca…

Maʿbad b. Wahb (d. c.126/743) was a singer in the Umayyad court. Raised in Medina, he was a mawlā (client) of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Qaṭar (or Qaṭan) who was, in turn, a mawlā of either al-ʿĀṣ b. Wābiṣa al-Makhzūmī or the caliph Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān (r. 41–60/661–80). He was of mixed Arab and African descent, his father being black, and was tall and cross-eyed. He sang in Damascus at the courts of Yazīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 101–5/720–4) and al-Walīd b. Yazīd (r. 125–6/743–4). He became semi-paralysed, lost his voice, and then die…

Maʿ bar (Mabar) is the name given by the Muslims to the Coromandel Coast, in Tamil Nadu, India, from at least the sixth/twelfth century, appearing in Muslim chronicles, along with the name of its capital city, Madura, from the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth. The high official, historian, and physician of Īlkhānid Iran Rashīd al-Dīn (c. 645–718/1247–1318) mentions Maʿbar as “the key to India,” with a distance of 300 parasangs (about 1,680 kilometres) from the Malabar port of Kaulam (Quilon or…

Macaronic poetry is a kind of mixed-language verse emerging from the mediaeval European context, which also exists in the mediaeval Islamicate world. While examples of macaronic poetry existed in mediaeval Arabic literature, the phenomenon did not develop into a formal artistic practice as it did in Persian and later in Turkish poetry. The macaronic poem in Persian was a well-established poetic form known as mulammaʿ (variegated in color), which typically entailed alternating between a hemistich or a verse in Arabic and one in Persian (Rāduyānī, 107; Vaṭvāṭ,…

Macaronic Turkic poetry is termed mülemma in Turkish (Ott. mülemmaʿ), from the Arabic mulammaʿ, which literally means “multi-coloured, motley,” but is used in literature to define “poems containing a verse, word, or word group written in another language” (Şemseddin Sâmi, 1403; Çağbayır, 3364). Talmīʿ, as a literary term, is the composition of mulammaʿ poems, and poems composed in this way are called mulammaʿāt (Tahiru’l-Mevlevi, 106, 158; Macit, 451). In Turkish literature, mülemma mostly designates poems of divan (dīvān, high culture) Ottoman poets written in Turkish-P…

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island, lies in the southwestern Indian Ocean, separated by the Mozambique Channel from the African mainland by approximately 420 kilometres. Neighbouring countries are the Comoros in the northwest and Mauritius and the French overseas department of La Réunion in the east. In 1896, the island was colonised by the French. It gained independence in 1960 as the Republic of Madagascar, with Antananarivo as its capital. The estimated population in 2017 was twent…

Al-Madāʾin (lit. “the cities”; plural of al-madīna), derived from the Aramaic “Māḥozē” or “Medinātā,” was the Arabic name given to a Sāsānian metropolis composed of several adjacent cities. Located on both sides of the Tigris river, about 20 miles southeast of ʿAbbāsid Baghdad, the metropolis was the imperial administrative capital of the Sāsānian Empire (224–651 C.E.) and the winter residence of the Sāsānian kings. At the time of the Muslim conquest in 16/637 al-Madāʾin had a large and diverse popula…

Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh b. Abī Sayf al-Qurashī l- Madāʾinī (d. c.228/843) was an important Arabic akhbārī, composer, and collector of historical and literary traditions, who lived in early ʿAbbāsid Iraq. 1. Life No date relating to al-Madāʾinī’s life is known with certainty. The date found in the sources for his birth is 135/752–3 (al-Marzubānī, Nūr, 184). We can treat this as his approximate year of birth. More certain is that he was born in Basra. For the entirety of his life he seems to have remained within Iraq, albeit in different cities. Al-Madāʾinī came from a fami…

Mawlānā Sayyid Ḥusayn Aḥmad Madanī (1879–1957) was the foremost madrasa-based Islamic scholar to participate actively in the Indian nationalist movement and oppose, on both pragmatic and Islamic grounds, the creation of the separate state of Pakistan. Madanī attended the Dār al-ʿUlūm at Deoband, a major centre for reformist Ḥanafī scholarship, where he studied with Mawlānā Maḥmūd al-Ḥasan (d. 1920) and became a disciple in taṣawwuf (Ṣūfism) of Mawlānā Rashīd Aḥmad Gangohī (d. 1905). In 1892, his pious father resigned as a government schoolteacher and moved t…

Al-Madaniyya is a Ṣūfī order named after Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ḥamza Ẓāfir al-Madanī (1194–1263/1780–1847), who was a disciple and companion of the Moroccan Shādhilī master Mawlāy al-ʿArbī al-Darqāwī (d. 1823). After a rapid expansion to North Africa and the Middle East, the Madaniyya declined steadily from the last decade of the nineteenth century: in its place, another branch of the Shādhiliyya-Darqāwiyya emerged, that of Shaykh Aḥmad al-ʿAlāwī, from which the Tunisian Madaniyya developed in th…

Nurcholish Madjid (1939–2005) was a leading Indonesian Muslim intellectual, who began his career as a prominent student leader in the 1960s and became one of the most influential Islamic thinkers and activists in late twentieth-century Indonesia. He was born in Jombang, the heartland of traditionalist Javanese Islam, to parents that subscribed to reformist-modernist Islamic ideas, leading to his family being socially ostracised. This experience was formative for the young man and shaped his lifel…

The madrasa in South Asia was the main institution for transmitting Islamic knowledge and sustaining Islamic identity. 1. The Delhi Sultanate The first madrasas appear to have been founded after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 602/1206. One was the Muʿizziya, probably founded by Iltutmish (r. 607–33/1211–36) and named after Muḥammad Ghūrī’s title Muʿizz al-Dīn (Muḥammad Ghūrī ruled in Ghazna 569–99/1173–1203). The second, the Nāṣiriyya, was built by Balban (r. 664–86/1266–87), while he was chief minister t…

The madrasa in Southeast Asia is commonly known as pesantren or pondok. The root of the former term is the word santri, which may be of South Indian origin and means student (of religion); pondok is the local pronunciation of Arabic funduq and refers to the dormitory or row of huts in which the santri are lodged. In some regions the institution is known by yet other names, such as dayah in Aceh and surau in West Sumatra. The chief teacher of the pesantren is the kiai, who holds unchallenged authority over the institution. In Indonesia, the term madrasah refers to a different type of school, …

Madura, an island in the Java Sea and part of the Indonesian province of East Java, is characterised by a mixture of strong Islamic characteristics and a distinctive local culture. It comprises an area of approximately 4,250 square kilometres and consists of four regencies ( kabupaten), which are, from west to east: Bangkalan, Sampang, Pamekasan, and Sumenep. According to the 2015 census, the island had a population of 3,808,533. The main language spoken is Madurese. There are two dialects, with varying levels of prestige accorded to them,…

Madurai (also spelt Madura or Mathura, in Tamil Nadu state, India, latitude N 9°54′, longitude E 78°6′), a Hindu pilgrimage centre on the river Vaigai, was under Muslim rule following raids by the Delhi sultans ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Khaljī (r. 695–715/1296–1316) (Vaṣṣāf, 4:527; Amīr Khusraw, 126, 172–4, 181; Baranī, 283) and his successor Mubārak Shāh (r. 716–20/1316–20) (Baranī, 398–9; Firishta, 1:126), culminating in the short-lived independent Maʿbar sultanate (734–79/1334–77). As governor, Jalāl al-D…

Ma families of warlords (馬家軍閥, Ma jia jun fa) is a collective term for three separate Hui Muslim lineages, all surnamed Ma, who dominated militarily and politically large parts of northwestern China from the late nineteenth century, through the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, to the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. There is no evidence that the three lineages were related, but all of them had roots in western Hezhou prefecture (in Gansu province), and two of them hai…

Ma Fulong (馬福龍, 1919–70) was a Chinese Islamic scholar of Hui ethnicity and a leading figure of the Ningxia Hui community in the twentieth century. His courtesy name (a name bestowed upon an adult Chinese male in lieu of his given name for use in formal settings) was Yuncheng, and his pen name was Ma Hanying. He also went by the Arabic name Ayyūb. Ma was born into a religious family in Helan district, Ningxia province, in northwestern China. From his childhood, he studied Islamic belief and practices, the Arabic and Persian languages, and the Chinese classic…