Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Leonardo Fibonacci (d. after 1241 C.E.) was one of the transmitters of Arabic mathematical knowledge to Christian Europe and the only mathematician known by name who transmitted matters inspired by practical and commercially useful arithmetic. He was born in Pisa, probably between 1170 and 1180, a son of Guglielmo de filiis Bonaccii, whence the modern surname Fibonacci. Outside Pisa he referred to himself as pisano (“from Pisa”), while two documents from Pisa and several of his introductions iden…

In quest of a term to designate the creation of “ fiction,” modern Arabic has adopted the word takhyīl—literally, “making something imaginary”—while, for fiction’s most basic parameter, irony—the interplay of knowledge and ignorance—the term mufāraqa is used. While the coinage of these generically specific words to identify narrative types and their modes of analysis may have occurred only during the last century or so, that is not to imply that the premodern Arabic literary heritage did not have its share of narratives of various types. The maqāmāt genre, for example, dating fro…

Modern Persian fiction includes writings in the Persian language in the genres of the novel (rumān) and the short story (dastān-i kūtāh), as well as sub-genres such as novellas, romances, and other narrative works in prose. Didactic genres, such as fictional travelogues, are excluded. Several factors account for the emergence of modern Persian fiction, beginning with the ideas promoted by the political activists and writers of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, such as Mirzā Fatḥ ʿAlī Ākhūnd-zāda (d. 1878). They find their literary…

Urdu fiction in the modern sense dates back only as far as the last decades of the nineteenth century, but storytelling has a long and rich tradition in South Asia, and Urdu, in particular, was historically rich in narrative forms drawing on Indic as well as Persian and Arabic sources, such as naql (tale, report, anecdote), laṭīfa (witticism, witty anecdote, joke), ḥikāyat (tale, fable, parable), and qiṣṣa and dāstān (initially synonymous, but later defined, respectively, as shorter tale and longer, more complex story). The evolution of modern Urdu fiction was t…

Fidāʾī is an Arabic neologism developed in the twentieth century in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The term depicts the Palestinian fighter as the one who pays with his or her life the ransom ( fidan, fidāʾ) required for the national liberation of Palestine. As the most common form this struggle took was guerrilla warfare ( ḥarb al-ʿiṣābāt), al-ḥarb al-fidāʾiyya became its synonym. The term first appeared in Palestine after World War I with the creation of an ephemeral association named Fidāʾīyya in Jaffa in 1919, which intended to attack Jewish s…

The Fidāʾiyyān-i Islām (usually spelt Fadāʾiyyān-i Islām in Persian) group was a radical Islamist movement in twentieth-century Iran. It was founded in March 1946, largely in response to Aḥmad Kasravī’s (1890–1946) critique of Shīʿī Islam. Its founder and leader was the young cleric Sayyid Mujtabā Mīrlawḥī, otherwise known as Navvāb-i Ṣafavī (1924–55). The group’s aim was to establish an Islamic government in Iran within the existing constitutional monarchy, and it had some affinities and contacts…

Figani (Fighānī, d. 938/1532) was the pen name of Ramazan (Ramaḍān) of Trabzon, an Ottoman poet who was executed for composing a couplet that accused the grand vizier İbrahim (İbrāhīm) Paşa (d. 942/1536) of idolatry for erecting three statues in front of his palace. When the couplet, which circulated openly, was attributed to Figani, the poet was quickly arrested, exhibited publicly on a mule, and strangled at the fish market in Istanbul’s Eminönü district. Executions of poets were rare in Ottoman Istanbul, and this event seems to have aroused great consternation in t…

Bābā Fighānī Shīrāzī (d. 925/1519) was a Persian poet born in Shiraz around the middle of the ninth/fifteenth century. Like many poets of the period, he came from a family of craftsmen, knife makers by trade. Nothing is known of his early education or his mentors in poetry. He first emerges on the literary scene in Tabriz as a poet of the Āq Quyūnlū dynasty, whose ruler Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (r. 883–96/1478–90) bestowed on him the honorific title bābā shāʿir or bābā al-shuʿarā (lit. “papa poet”) (Sām Mīrzā Ṣafavī, 176). Fighānī composed a ceremonial ode (qaṣīda) in praise of Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (Fighā…

Fijār (lit., sacrilege) is the name given to several tribal conflicts that took place in the Ḥijāz at the end of the sixth century CE. They were so called because they took place during holy months, in violation of a pre-Islamic socio-religious norm. The First Fijār (also called the First, Second, and Third Fijār) denotes three unrelated and historically insignificant incidents that occurred at the marketplace of ʿUkāẓ. The more significant Second Fijār (also called the Fourth or Last Fijār), comprised five battles involving tribal groups of the Kināna and Quray…

ʿAbdallāh Fikrī (1834–90) was an Egyptian writer and civil servant and a major contributor to the revival of the traditionalist strand of Arabic essay-writing in the nineteenth century. Born in the Ḥijāz, he moved to Egypt after the death of his father. In Cairo, he studied Persian and Turkish at al-Azhar and later tutored the khedive Ismāʿīl’s (r. 1863–79) children in those languages. In 1871 he was appointed deputy director at the Ministry of Education and worked under the supervision of ʿAlī M…

Islamic finance denotes financial transactions in compliance with Islamic principles. It is a business practice guided by Islamic law that has evolved in the context of global financial markets and is the most important application of Islamic contract law today. Moreover, it is the key area where the propositions of Islamic economics, in particular the ban on interest, are put into practice. In 2011, an aggregate of USD 1.3 trillion were reported to be under management in accordance with Islamic principles, with an expected annual growth rate of 17% (Ernst & Young). Islamic finance must n…

Ziyaeddin Fahri (Ḍiyāʾeddīn Fakhrī) Fındıkoğlu (1901–74), a Turkish sociologist and writer, also known by the pseudonym Ahmet Halil (Aḥmed Khalīl), was born in the small village of Çamlıyamaç (in the district of Tortum), near Erzurum, in eastern Anatolia. He graduated from the High School of Post and Telegraphy (Posta ve Telegraf Mekteb-i ʿĀlīsi) in 1922 and from the department of philosophy of the Darülfünun (Dār al-Fünūn, today’s İstanbul Üniversitesi/Istanbul University) in 1925. Between 1925 and…

Fines are monetary penalties imposed by legal and administrative authorities for a variety of offences. Fines were commonly used as a form of punishment in the Middle East before the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. The Byzantines and Sāsānians regularly utilised fines as legal and administrative measures. The Qurʾān does not mention fines. In classical discussions of law, however, the fine was considered a form of taʿzīr, or discretionary punishment, although there were disagreements on this interpretation. Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/796) and al-Shāfiʿī (d. …

The Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) is a body of Islamic scholars and imāms who issue fatwās ( fatāwā, formal legal opinions) and other religious pronouncements concerning Islamic perspectives and practices. Generally, the Council focuses its efforts on responding to questions from North American Muslims concerning modern issues not thoroughly addressed by classical jurists, particularly issues that are unique to a Muslim-minority context. FCNA emerged from what was originally known as the Religious Affairs Committee of the Muslim Students’ Association …

The term fiqh refers commonly to religious knowledge, especially knowledge of Islamic law derived through legal reasoning (ijtihād) (al-Shīrāzī, 1:157), and the term faqīh (pl. fuqahāʾ ) to someone who possesses such knowledge. Etymologically, the root f-q-h denotes subtle and penetrating discernment and comprehension, particularly of speech (al-Azharī, Tahdhīb al-lugha, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Hārūn, 15 vols., Cairo 1964–7, s.v. f-q-h; al-ʿAskarī, al-Furūq al-lughawiyya, ed. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Salīm, Cairo 1998, 87–8; al-Shīrāzī, 1:157). The connection between the root f-q-h an…

Firḍa (Ar., also furḍa; Ott. Turk. ferde) is a term used for several different personal taxes levied by the government in Ottoman Egypt and Syria. During the second half of the twelfth/eighteenth century, the firḍa is attested as one of many duties imposed on the peasantry by soldiers of the provincial governors (Shaw, Furḍa). In 1206/1791–2, Murād Bey and Ibrāhīm Bey, the joint de-facto rulers of Egypt between 1189/1775 and 1213/1798, used the term firḍat al-taḥrīr for a new levy to replace all the previous occasional duties. The firḍat al-taḥrīr belonged to the so-called mukhrījāt reve…

Abū l-Qāsim Firdawsī (329–411/940–1020) was a Persian poet, one of the greatest writers of epic and author of the Shāhnāma (“Book of kings”). 1. Firdawsī and the composition of the Shāhnāma Our sources about Firdawsī and his work are late, uncritical, and contradictory. The best authority is the Shāhnāma itself, which contains many allusions to Firdawsī’s thoughts or moods at various times of writing and to his material and family situation, age, and benefactors. Barely a century after his death, Firdawsī had become a legendary figure, and hi…

The Firdawsiyya is a regional Ṣūfī brotherhood ( ṭarīqa, lit., way) established in mediaeval India, first in Delhi and later in Bihar province. The Firdawsiyya is noted primarily for its scholarly excellence, especially in the writings of its prominent Ṣūfī masters (shaykhs). In the genealogies of its Ṣūfī masters, this Ṣūfī ṭarīqa traces its roots to the Kubrāwiyya, the Central Asian Ṣūfī ṭarīqa founded by Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221). Other sources suggest that the Firdawsiyya derives its name from Badr al-Dīn Firdawsī al-Samarqandī (d. c. 716/1316), …

Firdevsi-yi Rumi (Firdevsī-yi Rūmī, b. 857/1453; also with the attributes Tavil/Ṭavīl, Uzun, Osmani/ʿOthmānī, Türk) was an Ottoman author and poet, known by the pen name Firdevsi. Some copies of his works record his real name as İlyas b. Hızır (İlyās b. Khıḍr) or Şerefeddin Musa (Şerefeddīn Mūsā), with the latter now widely accepted. His name has also been given as Orhan (Orkhān), based on “Orkhān b. Geñek,” which was recorded in his Teşkhīṣ al-insān (“The identification of men”), as well as on “adı [named] Orkhān Çelebi,” in his Münazara-i seyf ü kalem ( Münāẓara-i seyf ü qalem, “The deba…

Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq is the name used in modern sources for Fīrūz Shāh (r. 752–90/1351–88), the regnal title of the third sultan in the Tughluq dynasty, which began with Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq (r. 720–4/1320–4, according to Jackson, 330–1) and lasted until the reign of Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd Tughluq (r. 796–815/1394–1412). Fīrūz Shāh’s father was named Rajab, the brother of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq, who served as commander of the army (sipāh-sālār). Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq arranged for his marriage to the daughter of the Rājā Rānmal Bhattī, a Hindu landowner of Dīpālpūr,…