Search

, Abu ’l-Farad̲j̲ ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Kātib , secretary of the chancery, man of letters, poet and physician, a native of Rayy but educated at Nis̲h̲āpūr, where he was introduced to Greek science. He belonged at first to the dīwān of ʿAḍud al-Dawla, for whom he wrote a number of letters; he appears at Arrad̲j̲ān in 354/965 during the visit of al-Mutanabbi, and he seems to have remained in the service of the Buwayhids until his death, probably in 410/1019 rather than 420/1029. In addition to a Dīwān , which is in part preserved in later anthologies, he was the …

, Abū ʿUmar ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿĀmir al-Yaḥṣubī , “reader” of the Ḳurʾān whose ḳirāʾa [ q.v.] is counted among the seven canonical “readings”. Of south Arabian origin, he belonged to the first class of the Tābiʿūn [ q.v.], his guarantors being ʿUt̲h̲mān b. ʿAffān, Abu ’l-Dardāʾ [ q.v.] and other less famous Companions. He settled in Damascus, where he was appointed ḳāḍī , by al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik and chief of police by Yazīd b. al-Walīd and Ibrāhīm b. al-Walīd; his “reading” was adopted by the inhabitants of Damascus. He died in 118/736…

b. Mirdās al-Fihrī , a poet of Mecca. Chief of the clan of Muḥārib b. Fihr in the Fid̲j̲ār [ q.v.], he fought against the Muslims at Uḥud and at the battle of the Trench, and wrote invectives against the Prophet. He was however converted after the capture of Mecca, but it is not known if he perished in the battle of Yamāma (12/633) or whether he survived and went to settle in Syria. (Ed.) Bibliography Sīra, ed. Saḳḳā, etc., Cairo 1375/1955, i, 414-5, 450, ii, 145-6, 254-5 Ṭabarī, index Muḥ. b. Ḥabīb, Muḥabbar, 170, 176, 434 Buḥturī, Ḥamāsa, index Ibn Sallām, Ṭabaḳāt, ed. S̲h̲ākir, 209-12 Ag̲h̲ānī, i…

Meḥmed (?-1271/1855), Ottoman Grand Vizier, educated in the Palace and raised to the post of head Čuk̲h̲adār on the accession of Ṣelīm III [ q.v.] in 1203/1789. He entered the service of Küčüḳ Ḥūseyn Pas̲h̲a, a protagonist of military and naval reform, who became Admiral ( Ḳapudan-i deryā ) in 1206/1792. In 1215/1801 K̲h̲osrew sailed with the fleet to Egypt, where he commanded a force of 6,000 and co-operated with the British in the recapture of Ras̲h̲īd and the defeat of French forces. In recognition of his services he was soon afterwards appointed wālī of Egypt. In Egypt he attempted to …

(a.), lit. “connection”, “what is connected”. 1. In grammar. Here the meaning is lit. “adjunct”. It is a syntactical term which denotes in the grammatical literature following Sībawayhi the clause which complements such word classes termed mawṣūl as the relative pronouns allad̲h̲ī , man , mā , ayy- and the subordinative an, anna . Its early development may be reconstructed as follows. Elements of two different Greek systems of parts of speech were imported synchronously into Arabic by the earliest Arab grammarians: an Aristot…

, the ancestor of the Banū Kalb, the strongest group of the Ḳuḍāʿa [ q.v.]. His mother, Umm al-Asbuʿ, was so called because all her sons were named after wild animals (T. Nöldeke, Neue Beiträge , 75 ff.). The Kalb were, according to the genealogical system (Ibn al-Kalbī, Ḏj̲amharat al-nasab etc.), of Yemenite descent, but sometimes they claimed for political reasons to belong to the Northern Arabs or even to Ḳurays̲h̲. I.—Pre-Islamic period Their greatest chieftain was Zuhayr b. Ḏj̲anāb. who had great authority among the northern tribes; so he was sent by Abraha [ q.v.] to control the Bak…

arabic language and literature. Al-ʿarabiyya , sc. lug̲h̲a , also lisān al-ʿarab , is: The Arabic language in all its forms. This use is pre-Islamic, as is shown by the appearance of lās̲h̲ōn ʿărāb̲h̲ī in third-century Hebrew sources, arabica lingua in St. Jerome’s Praefatio in Danielem this probably is also the sense of lisān ʿarabī ( mubīn ) in Ḳurʾān, xvi, 103 (105); xxvi, 195; xlvi, 12 (11). (2) Technically, the Classical Arabic language (Cl. Ar.) of early poetry, Ḳurʾān, etc., and the Literary Arabic of Islamic literature. This may be distinguished from ʿarabiyya in the wider sense as al…

(a.) “water”. The present article covers the religio-magical and the Islamic legal aspects of water, together with irrigation techniques, as follows: 1. Hydromancy A a vehicle for the sacred, water has been employed for various techniques of divination, and in particular, for potamonancy (sc. divination by means of the colour of the waters of a river and their ebbing and flowing; cf. FY. Cumont, Études syriennes , Paris 1917, 250 ff., notably on the purification power of the Euphrates, consulted for divinatory reasons); for pegomancy (sc…