Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Al-Ahrām, a prestigious Egyptian newspaper, is one of the earliest Arab journals and the oldest to survive into the twenty-first century. Founded in Alexandria by the Syrian emigrants Salīm and Bishāra Taqlā, al-Ahrām was launched on 5 August 1876. Several ephemeral journals had appeared earlier in Egypt, but al-Ahrām introduced new standards, presenting reliable, up to date information, rather than focusing on political battles. Beginning as a weekly, it shifted to daily frequency in 1881. In 1899 al-Ahrām relocated to Cairo, the beating heart of a vibrant journalistic scene. By Wo…

The Aḥrār Movement, or Majlis-i Aḥrār-i Islām (MAI, “Society of the Free Men of Islam”), was a small Panjabi Islamist movement founded in 1931. It grew out of the response of the Punjāb Khilafat (Panjāb Khilāfat) Committee (PKC, founded in the wake of the movement to safeguard the Ottoman caliphate after the Sèvres Treaty of 1920) to the 1928 Nehru Report, which did not provide for separate electorates (as had been demanded by Muslim League to safeguard Muslim political interests), but allowed for…

Khvāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār (Ramaḍān 806–895/March 1404–1490) was a renowned pīr (lit., “old” in Persian, hence “Ṣūfī master”) of the Naqshbandī ṭarīqa (lit., “way,” hence “Ṣūfī order”) in late ninth/fifteenth-century Samarqand ( khvāja (lit., “Master”), is an honorific designation of Ṣūfī masters, which often came to be used as a surname). He was a khalīfa (lit., “deputy”) of Yaʿqūb Charkhī (d. 851/1447), influential at the Tīmūrid courts of Samarqand and Herat, and an important economic figure in Māwarānnahr (Yaʿqūb Charkhī was himself the khalīfa of Bahaʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, d.…

Al-Aḥsāʾ is a cluster of oases in the Eastern Province (al-Minṭaqa al-Sharqiyya) of Saudi Arabia. The name al-Aḥsāʾ (or al-Ḥasā) has frequently been applied to the eastern coastal region in general. Its most important settlements in modern history are the capital, al-Hufūf, and al-Mubarraz. The population has traditionally been divided almost evenly between Sunnīs and Twelver Shīʿīs. Al-Aḥsāʾ has always been one of the largest agricultural areas of the Arabian Peninsula (more than twelve thousand hectares). Its economy was based mainly on date cultiva…

Shaykh Aḥmad b. Zayn al-Dīn al-Aḥsāʾī (1166–1241/1753–1826) was an ʿālim, an Imāmī mystic and philosopher, and the eponymous leading figure of the theological-mystical school of the Shaykhiyya. He was born in al-Aḥsāʾ (also known as al-Ḥasā), in al-Baḥrayn (in the premodern sense, referring to the mainland of eastern Arabia), to a family that had converted to Imāmī Shīʿism five generations earlier. Little is known of the first years of his life but that he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Neithe…

Aḥsan al-tavārīkh by Ḥasan Beg Rūmlū (b. 937/1530–1, d. c.985/1577) is an annalistic Persian chronicle in two volumes covering about two centuries of the history of Asia Minor, Transoxania, and Iran in the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. 1. Content of the volumes Of the Aḥsan al-tavārīkh (“The best of histories”), only two volumes, the so-called volumes eleven and twelve, have come down to us, one covering the ninth/fifteenth century and the other the tenth/sixteenth. Rūmlū originally organised his work into twelve volumes b…

Ahteri (Akhterī, d. 968/1560–1 or 986/1578–9) is the appellation of the Turkish scholar and lexicographer Muslihuddin Mustafa b. Şemseddin el-Karahisari (Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Muṣṭafā b. Shams al-Dīn al-Ḳaraḥiṣārī), who was born in Karahısar (present-day Afyonkarahisar, in western Turkey) and taught at the Haliliye Medrese in the central Anatolian town of Kütahya. Ahteri is famous for his Arabic-Ottoman Turkish lexicon Akhterī-yi kebīr fī’l-lugha (“Primary lexicon of Ahteri”), completed in 952/1545–6. This work, also known as Akhterī-yi kebīr (“Primary Ahteri”) and Lughāt-ı Akhte…

Al-Aḥwal, Abū l-ʿAbbās Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Dīnār al-Hāshimī (d. 259/873?), was a lexicographer and an expert in poetry who spent most of his life in Baghdad. He was born in Baghdad shortly after 200/815. He transmitted poetry from Abū ʿUthmān Saʿdān b. al-Mubārak al-Ḍarīr (d. 220/835), Muḥammad b. Ziyād Ibn al-Aʿrābī (d. 231/846), and Abū l-Ḥasan al-Athram (d. 232/846), and became the teacher of prominent disciples, above all al-Yazīdī (d. 310/922), ʿAlī b. Sulaymān, known as al-Akhfash al-Aṣghar (d. 315/927), and Nifṭawayh (d. 323/935). He earned his living as a bookseller ( warrāq…

Aḥmad Fuʾād al-Ahwānī (1908–70) was an Egyptian professor of Islamic philosophy who promulgated modern Western philosophy and psychology. He was born in Cairo and attended a kuttāb and state-run schools there. In 1929, after four years at the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), he graduated with a degree in philosophy and in 1931 received the diploma of the High Institute of Education ( Maʿhad al-Tarbiya al-ʿĀlī). Until 1944 he taught at a secondary school, continued his research, and lectured in Spain, Germany, Italy, and France. He completed his doc…

Aḥwash is a genre of singing and dancing emblematic of the tashlḥiyt-speaking Berbers of the Anti-Atlas and western and central High Atlas in Morocco. Performed in the open air during the mass village gatherings that punctuate agricultural, social, and religious life (marriages, circumcisions, and pilgrimages to the tombs of saints), it consists of improvised exchanges between individual poet-singers as well as choral singing in unison. The poet-singers, who must display mastery of both the vocal art and t…

Al-Ahwāz (Pers. Ahvāz) is a city in Khūzistān (a province of southwestern Persia), located at 31° 19' N, 48° 46' E. It is situated on both sides of the Kārūn River (also known as Dujayl, the “small Tigris”), where the river enters the plain after cutting through a chain of sandstone hills that cause rapids that long prevented the river's navigation. The city was probably built on the site of the Achaemenid city of Tareiana, where the royal road connecting Susa with Persepolis crossed the river b…

ʿĀʾisha bt. Yūsuf b. Aḥmad b. Naṣr al-Bāʿūniyya, a prolific writer and poet, and a Ṣūfī, was born in Damascus, around the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century, and died on 16 Dhū l-Qaʿda 923/30 November 1517. She was a distinguished member of the al-Bāʿūnī family, which served the Mamlūk sultans as religious officials in Syria and Egypt. She composed more than a dozen works in prose and poetry and, among women, is one of the most prolific Arab authors prior to the twentieth century. In one of her writings, ʿĀʾisha notes that by the age of eight she had memorised the Qurʾān. She then studied ḥadīth…

ʿĀʾisha bt. Abī Bakr (d. 58/678), wife of the prophet Muḥammad and daughter of Abū Bakr (d. 13/634), the first caliph, is arguably the most famous woman of early Islam and also its most controversial. 1. Her life and importance She was born in Mecca around 614 C.E. to Abū Bakr b. Abī Quḥāfā, from the Banū Taym, and Umm Rūmān bt. ʿUmayr b. ʿĀmir, from the Banū Kināna. ʿĀʾisha is deemed to have been the nineteenth person to embrace Islam. ʿĀʾisha entered the prophet Muḥammad’s home as his wife about three years before the hijra (migration) to Medina, when she was around six or seven years o…

ʿĀʾisha bt. Aḥmad al-Qurṭubiyya (d. 400/1009) was an Andalusian poet, probably born in Córdoba. Although the sources shed no light on her origins, her full name is thought to have been ʿĀʾisha bt. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Qādim b. Ziyād, and she was certainly the sister of the man of letters Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Qādim (d. 380/990). She is also said to have been the niece of Abū ʿAbdallāh b. Qādim al-Ṭabīb, a famous physician and poet from Cordova whose date of death is unknown. It is perhaps because sh…

ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalḥa (d. c.110/728) was the daughter of the well-known Companion of the prophet Muḥammad, Ṭalḥa b. ʿUbaydallāh al-Taymī and Umm Kulthūm, the daughter of Abū Bakr. Thus she was also the niece of her famous namesake, ʿĀʾisha bt. Abī Bakr (d. 58/678), the wife of the Prophet. ʿĀʾisha married three times: first her cousin ʿAbdallāh b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Bakr; then, after he died, Muṣʿab b. al-Zubayr; then, on Muṣʿab's death in 72/691, ʿUmar b. ʿUbaydallāh b. Maʿmar al-Taymī (Ibn Saʿd, …

ʿĀʾisha Qandīsha is the name of the most important and well known jinniyya in Morocco, also known as Lallā ʿĀʾisha, ʿĀʾisha Sūdāniyya, or ʿĀʾisha Gnāwiyya. The name “Qandīsha” goes back to the Hebrew qedēshā “sacred prostitute” (qandīsha seems to be a dissimilation of qaddīsha), and belief in her is surely related to ancient Astarte cults, as Westermarck suggests. According to some, ʿĀʾisha Qandīsha is married to a jinn called Ḥammū Qiyu, whose character, however, is not so well developed. Like other jnūn, she prefers to live in springs or rivers; in towns or villages she li…

The life and works of ʿĀʾisha Taymūr (1840–1902), a leading woman writer, commentator, and poet, underlined the cultural changes taking place in Egypt’s Ottoman elite class, the gender relations within their families, and the individual initiative taken by children and adults that shaped modernity. Her father, Ismāʿīl Taymūr, was of Kurdish-Turkish ancestry, and his knowledge of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic qualified him for positions in the government bureaucracy. Her mother, Māhitāb, was a freed Cir…

Aïssaouas (ʿĪsāwa) is the collective name (sing. ʿĪsāwī) for members of the religious order (al-ṭarīqa al-ʿīsāwiyya) founded in Morocco during the early tenth/sixteenth century by Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā l-Sufyānī l-Mukhtārī, known among his followers as “the Perfect Master” (al-shaykh al-kāmil). The order traces its spiritual ancestry to the Shādhiliyya-Jazūliyya tradition through the Ṣūfī masters Ibn ʿĪsā (d. 933/1526–1527), Aḥmad al-Ḥārithī l-Sufyānī (d. c. 1000/1592–1593), ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Ṭabbāʿ (d. 914/1508–1509), and Muḥammad al-Ṣaghīr a…

Ajal is the Arabic term for the predetermined length of one's life or the appointed time of one's death. Qurʾānic verses differ on the question of whether or not ajal, decreed by God, is susceptible of being changed by man. On the one hand, Q 7:34, 10:49, 16:61, 29:53, 35:11, and 71:4 affirm a fixed time of death and Q 16:61, 35:45, and 42:14 state that even sins do not shorten one's lifetime. On the other hand, verses such as Q 2:179, 11:3, and 14:10 imply that punishment and repentance may alter one's ajal. However, the majority of verses reflect the idea that only God can predetermin…

ʿAjārida is the name applied to those second/eighth-century Persian Khārijī sects associated with ʿAbd al-Karīm b. ʿAjarrad (or Ibn ʿAjrad). According to Ibn Ḥazm, the term refers to “most of the Khawārij of Khurāsān” (4:145). The heresiographers generally take Ibn ʿAjarrad to have begun his career as a supporter of ʿAṭiyya b. al-Aswad, a Khārijī leader from Arabia who arrived in Kirmān in 72/691; Ibn ʿAjarrad is also said (less credibly) at one time to have been a follower of Abū Bayhas, differ…