(“Shadow fantasy”), popular Arabic name for the shadow-play, possibly brought over from South-East Asia or India and performed in Muslim lands from the 12th century A.D. to the 20th one. Although occasionally presented during the long evenings of the Ramaḍān fast, it has now virtually disappeared with the spread of education, the cinema and television.

The only extant texts of medieval Arabic shadow-plays were composed in the 7th/13th century A.D. by an Egyptian ophthalmologist, Ibn Dāniyāl [q.v.], and consist of a humorous pageant of Egyptian life under the Mamlūk ruler Baybars I [q.v…