Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Job (Ar., Ayyūb) is mentioned in two extended passages in the Qurʾān, 21:83–4 and 38:41–4; he is also mentioned, along with other prophets, in two other verses (Q 4:163, 6:84). The first of the long passages (Q 21:83–4) mentions Job’s invocation to God and the fact that God relieved him of his suffering and restored his family to him. The torments with which he was tested are only alluded to. The second passage touches on the same points, including Job’s invocation, followed by God’s decree rest…

Jochi (b. c.579/1184, d. 624/1227) was the eldest son of Chinggis Khān, founder of the Mongol empire. Jochi was allotted by his imperial father the westernmost territories of the empire and may be regarded as the virtual founder of the Mongol-Tatar state called Ulus Jochi, later referred to often as the Golden Horde. 1. Life Jochi was born under obscure circumstances. (It is not certain whether or not Börte was pregnant before her captivity. In the former case, Chinggis could not be Jochi’s father, which is why many contemporaries, including his own…

Iōannēs Damaskēnos (Yaḥyā b. Sarjūn b. Manṣūr; b. after 29/650, d. before 136/754), known in the West as John of Damascus, was a Christian theologian and apologist famous for his rejection of iconoclasm and other “heretical” movements, amongst which he counted Islam. The only biographical information we have is from later hagiographical sources, according to which he was born into a Christian family of the Chalcedonian, or Melkite, rite, a family that was highly respected by the Umayyad caliphs. John seems to have …

Arabic literature of the pre-Mongol period contains many thousands of jokes. From the fourth/tenth century onwards, jokes were compiled into joke books, a genre that remained popular in the post-Mongol and modern periods. A similar, although chronologically somewhat later, development took place in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other literatures of the Muslim world. 1. The genre The classical, premodern, and modern literatures of the Muslim world are a vast treasure-trove of jocular prose (Marzolph, Arabia ridens; Marzolph, 101 Middle Eastern Tales). In classical Arabic lit…

The city of Jombang lies in the district of the same name, which had a population of 1,371,952 in 2014. The province of East Java, where the city of Jombang are located, is regarded as home to the biggest Indonesian Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, founded in 1926), and the centre of Islamic boarding schools ( pesantrens) in Indonesia. According to the federal Ministry of Religious Affairs, in 2000–1 two-thirds of the 8,445 pesantrens in Indonesia and almost ninety percent of the 2.648 pesantrens in East Java had an affiliation with the Nahdlatul Ulama. The largest an…

Joseph (Yūsuf), like his father Jacob and his grandfather Abraham, is revered by Muslims as a distinguished prophet. His story, told in the twelfth sūra of the Qurʾān, lies at the core of a large and multifaceted tradition that later grew around his figure. The Qurʾānic story of Joseph illustrates a few Islamic dogmatic propositions. First, that God, being the sovereign and dominant Lord of the universe, is fully capable of carrying out his plans against all opposition, even though this may not be apparent to ordinary human eyes or minds …

Shabbīr Ḥasan Khān Josh Malīḥābādī (d. 22 February 1982) was an Urdu writer remembered for his tell-all autobiography as well as for his anticlerical, anti-imperial, nationalist, revolutionary, and romantic poetry. 1. Life Josh was born on 5 December 1894, 1896, or 1898 (the sources differ) at Malīḥābād, British India into a wealthy family of landowners whose ancestors had come from near Kabul to India in the twelfth/eighteenth century to join the army of Ṣafdar Jang (nawab of Awadh, r. 1152–67/1739–54). His paternal great-gra…

Joshua (Ar., Yūshaʿ b. Nūn) is not mentioned in the Qurʾān, but, according to some exegeses, certain verses must allude to him. Most of the sources, beginning with the early commentaries, have identified Joshua as the servant (Ar. fatā) of Moses mentioned in Q 18:60, 62, in the story of the meeting between Moses and the mysterious figure al-Khiḍr (Muqātil, 2:592; al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ, 15:271; al-Bukhārī, nos. 122, 4725–7). Other interpretations maintain that one of the two God-fearing men mentioned in Q 5:23 must be Joshua (Muqātil, 1:466; al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ, 6:176). Joshua is also allud…

Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān (1883–1931) was a renowned Lebanese-born writer of poetry and fiction and a cultural icon in the mahjar (emigré) school of Arab-American writers. He was born on 6 January 1883, in the Maronite Christian town of Bsharri, Lebanon, on the slopes of the Wādī Qadīshā (Sacred Valley), just west of the sacred cedar grove that came to symbolise in his writings all that was holy and numinous in his homeland. At the time of Jubrān’s birth, Lebanon had been under Ottoman rule for four centuries. He would…

Juḥā is a pseudo-historical character whom oral and literary tradition have, over the centuries, turned into the most popular protagonist of jocular tales, jokes, and pranks in the Arab world. First documented in third/ninth-century Arabic literature, the character became especially popular in Arabic and North African Berber tradition, but also in Sephardic, Sicilian, Maltese, and mediaeval Persian traditions. Mediaeval Arabic historians and biographers tend to see Juḥā as a historical person who lived in the second/eighth century; some even regard him…

Jumadil Kubra (Jumādī l-Kubrā) is a legendary saint whose name occurs in Javanese chronicles ( babad) as the common ancestor of several of the Nine Saints ( wali sanga) credited with the Islamisation of Java. In the much abbreviated genealogies given in these chronicles, he is the person connecting the Arabian and Southeast Asian stages of Islamic history. A typical genealogy begins with the prophet Muḥammad and then lists in succession his daughter Fāṭima, her son Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī, and his son Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, followed by w…

The Christian Maronite Jumayyil family (Fr., Gemayel; Ar., al-Jumayyil) hails from the village of Bikfayā in the upper Matn region of Mount Lebanon. Members of the family have been involved in local politics and served the Maronite Church for centuries. Philibos Gemayel (Fīlībus al-Jumayyil) (1740–96) served as Maronite Patriarch for a few months in 1795–6; several other members of the family served as bishops at various times. Lebanese emigration, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, touched the Jumayyil family, some of whose members emigrated to Egypt, th…

Kamal Jumblat (Ar., Kamāl Junbulāṭ, 1917–77) was a Lebanese politician, Druze chieftain, and leftist intellectual. He was born in Mukhtāra, in the Shūf Mountain region, and educated at the Lazarist School in Aintoura, in the Kisrawān district. He then studied law in Paris and at the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut. Elected to parliament in 1943, Jumblat entered politics following the death that year of his brother-in-law, Ḥikmat Jumblat, and assumed the three-centuries-old leadership of one of …

Junagarh (Junāgaŕh, from jūnun “old” and gaďh “fort” in Gujarātī; more fanciful etymologies have been proposed) is a city in the Saurashtra or Kathiawar peninsula of India, now the headquarters of the Junagarh district of Gujarat state. From 1167/1754 to 1368/1949, it was the capital of a princely state of the same name, also known as Sorath (a variant of Saurashtra). 1. Geography and people The state had an area of 8,643 square kilometres in 1947. It included the Girnar mountains and the Gir forest which, in the nineteenth century, covered a third of its ter…

The long history of the Junaydīs of India has remained obscure until recently. The discovery of extracts from Aṭvār al-abrār (“The manners of the holy men”)—a biographical dictionary written by the Junaydī Ṣūfī ʿAyn al-Dīn Muḥammad, known as Ganj al-ʿIlm (“Treasure of knowledge”), a contemporary of the Delhi sultan Muḥammad b. Tughluq (r. 725–52/1325–51), and the early Bahmanī rulers of the Deccan—throws new light on the presence of many Junaydī Ṣūfīs in North India and the Deccan during the Delhi sultanate (602–9…

Junbish-i Sabz-i Īrān (The Green Movement of Iran) is the civil and political rights movement framed in democratic and Islamic principles, premises, and symbols that emerged in the context of Iran’s 2009 presidential elections. The tenth presidential election in Iran was held on Friday 12 June 2009. In this election, the incumbent conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Maḥmūd Aḥmadīnizhād) was challenged by three candidates, the most prominent being former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi (Mīr Ḥusayn Mūsavī). Massive street demonst…

Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh al-Jannān al-Junbulānī (235–87/849–900) was a prominent ʿAlawī dignitary and the second successor to Ibn Nuṣayr (fl. mid-third/ninth century), the founder of the ʿAlawī Shīʿī sect and the bāb (“gate” to ʿAlī's esoteric essence). Ibn Nuṣayr was first succeeded by Muḥammad b. Jundab, about whom nothing is known other than his name, followed by al-Junbulānī. Al-Junbulānī was the teacher of al-Khaṣībī (d. 346/957 or 358/968), who would later go on to formulate the sect's doctrine and write several books. T…

Anwar al-Jundī (1917–2002) was an Egyptian journalist and literary critic known for his bio-bibliographical reference works and monographs on individual Arab Muslim writers as well as his polemical works against Western cultural influence in the Arab World in general and secularism in particular. Born in the town of Dayrūṭ, al-Jundī first worked as a bank clerk, but managed to develop a keen interest in literary studies outside of work. His early articles appeared in the Egyptian journal Apollo, a short-lived (1932–4) but influential avant-guard literary magazine (Kocarev, Pisatel…

Jundīshāpūr (Gondēshāpūr, Jundaysābūr, from Middle Persian Weh-Andiok-Shabuhr, “Better is Shāpūr’s Antioch”) was a city in Khūzistān (ancient Elam), in today’s southwestern Iran. Its Syriac name, Bet Lapaṭ/Belapaṭ, according to archaeologist Daniel Potts, “derived, according to a folk etymology preserved by al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), from that of its builder, Bel” (Potts, 421). The city was founded by the Sāsānian king Shāpūr I (r. 239–70 C.E.) after his first conquest of Antioch, in 256 C.E. (Shah…

Qalandar Bakhsh (lit., gift of the qalandar, wandering mystic), supplicated for intercession towards God to have a son) (b. c.1162/1749, d. 1809–10), whose pen name was Jurʾat (lit., courage), was an Urdu poet renowned for his sensual ghazal poetry and his satires. His birth name is given variously as Yaḥyā Mān and Yaḥyā Amān. One scholar argues that the former is correct and is shared by other members of the family and that the name Amān was given to him by authors of biographical dictionaries (Naqvī, 10). Another notes that both names were used by members of the family (Ḥasan, 17–8). 1. Life Ju…