Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Ṭalḥa b. ʿUbaydallāh, a prominent early Companion of Muḥammad, is considered to have been among the first eight converts to Islam and one of the ten mubashshara to whom the Prophet promised Paradise. He belonged to the Banū ʿAmr b. Kaʿb, the leading clan of the Taym b. Murra of the Quraysh, and was a second-degree cousin of Abū Bakr, with whom he was already closely associated before the advent of Islam. Abū Bakr, who was some twenty years his elder, may have trained him in the caravan trade in Syria, a business he later pursued successfully. By his own account, he first learned of the adve…

The poet prince Tamīm b. al-Muʿizz (d. 374/985), a son of the fourth Fāṭimid caliph-Imām, al-Muʿizz li-Dīn Allāh (r. 341–65/953–75), was renowned as a poet of elegance and refinement. He was born on 24 Rajab 337/27 January 949, in al-Mahdiyya, in present-day Tunisia, the city founded by the first Fāṭimid caliph-Imām al-Mahdī as his new capital (al-Maqrīzī, al-Muqaffā, 2:588). Soon the capital was moved to the new city of al-Manṣūriyya, built in 337/948 by the third Fāṭimid caliph- imām, al-Manṣūr bi-llāh (r. 334–41/946–53), and it was there that Tamīm grew up and received…

Tayyarzade Ata Bey (Ṭayyār-zāde ʿAṭāʾallah Aḥmad Beg), an Ottoman historian and poet, was born in Istanbul in 1225/1810. He was the son of a palace official, Tayyar (Ṭayyār, d. 1248–9/1833), who was a head lala ( lālā, tutor to young princes). Ata Bey was appointed as a clerk at Tophane (Ṭopkhāne, the state’s main ordnance factory) in 1240/1824. The following year, in 1241/1825, he was assigned to the imperial larder (Kiler-i hassa/kilār-ı khaṣṣa) at the palace, by order of Sultan Mahmud (Maḥmūd) II (r. 1223–55/1808–39). In 1249/1834, …

Tazmamart (Ar., Tāzmāmārt) was a secret prison, where military personnel and a few civilians were forcibly detained for various periods between 1973 and 1991, when an international human-rights campaign forced Morocco to release the survivors and demolish the two buildings where they had been imprisoned (Hayʾat al-Inṣāf, 63). Despite the evidence collected by human-rights activists in France during 1980s, the Moroccan authorities denied the existence of Tazmamart until 1991 (Dalle, 513). Named for a southeastern Moroccan village in the present-day governorate of Er…