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(a.), literally, “accounting”. 1. In mystical theology. Here the term is more precisely muḥāsabat al-nafs , “inward accounting, spiritual accounting’’. The concept is connected both with the Ḳurʾānic symbolism of commerce and with that of the final end of man. It should be noted that, like all the verbal nouns of the mufāʿala type, linguistic creations in the fields of the Arab-Islamic sciences and of spirituality, the word muḥāsaba belongs neither to the lexicon of the Ḳurʾān nor to that of the Tradition. Ḳurʾānic vocabulary and the vocabu…

(a.), or riʾāʾ according to Ḳurʾānic orthography (thrice in the expression riʾāʾ al-nās , II, 264; IV, 38; VIII, 47), maṣdar or verbal noun of form III of raʾā “to see”, with the meaning of ostentation or hypocrisy. The concept of riyāʾ is made explicit and developed in Tradition; in Wensinck’s Concordance , i/2, 202-3, there are to be found under rāʾā 23 distinct ḥadīt̲h̲s . But the most complete source comes in the S̲h̲uʿab al-īmān of al-Bayhaḳī, in ch. 45, which deals with pious works devoted to God and the avoidance of ostentation (ed. Zag̲h̲l…