Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

The name Banū l-Qabṭūrnuh refers to three brothers from the Andalusī city of Badajoz (Ar. Baṭalyaws) famous for their Arabic prose and poetry. The lives of Abū Bakr ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, Abū Muḥammad Ṭalḥa, and Abū l-Ḥasan Muḥammad spanned the late fifth/eleventh century to the first half of the sixth/twelfth. All three brothers—sons of Saʿīd b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz who shared the nisba al-Baṭalyawsī—held high official positions at the court of the petty kingdom of the Banū l-Afṭas in Badajoz. After the Almoravid takeover of the entire territory of al-Andalus, which e…

The Qadariyya was a loosely organised Islamic theological movement promoting the doctrine of human free will. The name Qadariyya, generally applied derogatorily, derives from the movement’s assertion that humans possess qadar, the capacity to determine their own actions. This use of the term contrasts with Qurʾānic references in which qadar is typically associated with God’s volition rather than that of humans. The Qadariyya first appeared in about 70/690, were most active during the late Umayyad period (c. 101–32/720–50), and were eventually …

Al-Qāʿida (al-Qaeda, “The Base”) is a transnational jihadist organisation, which was founded in 1988 by Usama Bin Laden (Usāma b. Lādin, 1957–2011). It perpetrated the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on 11 September 2001 (also referred to as 9/11). 1. Emergence in Afghanistan and formative years in Sudan (1988–96) Al-Qāʿida was founded in the late 1980s, when the Saudi Arabian national Usama Bin Laden established his own Arab fighting force in Afghanistan, leading to a split among the “Arab Afghans,” who were led by the Palestin…

Suhayr al-Qalamāwī (1911–97) was an Egyptian academic, essayist, literary critic, journalist, short story writer, politician, and feminist. She was born to a well-to-do family in Cairo and, after graduating from the Cairo American College, intended to follow in her father’s footsteps by training as a physician. When her application was rejected by the then Egyptian University, she decided to study Arabic language and literature at the same institution. Even at this early stage in her university e…

The qānūn is a Middle Eastern psaltery with a right-angled trapezoidal shape and twenty-six sets of triple strings with a range of three octaves and a fifth, from G an octave and a fourth below middle C, to D two octaves and a second above middle C. The bridge on the right-hand side sits on five rectangular pieces of fish skin [Illustration 1]. The strings are plucked by picks of water-buffalo horn held on the index fingers by long flat silver rings. The qānūn was part of the takht (chamber ensemble) used in classical music and is now part of the firqa (larger ensemble) in both classical and po…

Abū Isḥāq Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbd al-Muʾmin al-Iskāfī (281–357/894–5/968), widely known as al-Qarārīṭī (or al-Qarāriṭī), was an ʿAbbāsid bureaucrat who served in Baghdad and later Aleppo in several capacities, including, briefly, wazīr. Al-Qarārīṭī’s family was associated with the court beginning at least a generation before his birth: his uncle ʿAbdallāh b. Ibrāhīm al-Iskāfī narrates an episode set in Sāmarrāʾ at the court of petitions (al-maẓālim) presided over by the caliph al-Muhtadī (r. 255–6/869–70) (al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, 4:118; Ibn al-Najjā…

The Qarmaṭians (Qarāmiṭa, sing. Qarmaṭī) were a subsect of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī branch of Islam. The name is derived from that of one of the earliest propagandists (dāʿī) of the sect in Lower Iraq, Ḥamdān b. al-Ashʿath, called Qarmaṭ, whose nickname was said to mean “short-legged, of short stature” in the local Aramaic dialect (Ibn al-Nadīm, 238). Other variants of the name are Qarmaṭūya (al-Nawbakhtī, 61) and Karmīta, said to mean “red-eyed” (al-Ṭabarī, 3:2125). The conversion of this former ox-driver by a wandering Ismāʿī…

The characteristics of the qəsidə (kaside) in Azerbaijani literature resemble those of the Ottoman kaside (qaṣīde), and therefore also of their Persian and Arabic counterparts. On the formal side, the Azerbaijani qəsidə is guided by a set of rules similar to those used in these languages. Yet, some terminological particularities exist. For instance, the main section of the Azerbaijani qəsidə, which contains the actual praise, is called qǝsd. The strongest direct influence on the Azerbaijani qəsidə came from the Persian qaṣīda. However, many Azerbaijani poets are credited wi…

The Qāsimī dynasty of Zaydī (Fiver) imāms is named after the eponymous founder Imām al-Manṣūr bi-llāh al-Qāsim b. Muḥammad (r. 1006–29/1598–1620). The term “Zaydī dynasty” is in many ways a self-contradiction, because the imāmate is a central tenet of traditional Zaydī doctrine. It is not hereditary and cannot be transferred through appointment by the sitting imām. Before the Qāsimīs, several Zaydī imāms had indeed followed their fathers, and most imāms came from a handful of powerful clans, at times resembling family dynasties. The Qāsimī dynasty is, however, un…

Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad Qazvīnī (d. after 978/1570–1) was a refugee from Ṣafavid Shīʿī rule in Qazvīn who moved with his family to Ottoman Damascus in 973/1565–6. There he wrote the Silsila-nāma-yi khvājagān-i Naqshband (“The book of the chain of the Naqshbandī Khvājagānī masters”), a silsila (“chain” representing Ṣūfī initiatic lineage) that serves as our primary source for the history of the Naqshbandī Ṣūfī brotherhood (ṭarīqa) during the first decades of Ṣafavid rule in Iran (the Naqshbandī brotherhood originated in fourteenth-century Bukhara). The Silsila-nāma soon attracted …