Search

Sayyid ʿUthmān Date of Birth: 1 December 1822 Place of Birth: Batavia, the Netherlands East Indies Date of Death: 18 January 1914 Place of Death: Batavia BiographySayyid ʿUthmān was born in Batavia. He studied in the Arabian Peninsula from 1841 to 1862 under various scholars, including the Meccan scholar Aḥmad Daḥlān. After his return to the Netherlands East Indies in 1862, His prolific preaching and writing brought him to prominence as a scholar of Islam. He printed his works on his own lithographic press from 1869 onwa…

Date of Birth: 1816 Place of Birth: Mecca Date of Death: 1886 Place of Death: Medina BiographyAḥmad Daḥlān was born into a family of  sayyids (descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad) in Mecca and started teaching there in 1848. The Ottoman authorities in the Hejaz appointed him to the rank of Mufti of the Shāfiʿī school of law in 1865. In addition, he held the position of chief scholar ( shaykh al-ʿulamāʾ) in the Holy City, and in this capacity he was one of the most prestigious scholars in the Muslim world of his day. He was very active as a writer and published on traditional topics, suc…

‘The pink apples from the gardens of the Muḥammadan sharīʿa’ Sayyid ʿUthmān Date: December 1880 Original Language: Arabic DescriptionThe  Al-tuffāḥa l-wardiyya was printed by Sayyid ʿUthmān himself on his own lithographic press. It comprises 56 pages. It is of particular interest because it was written  before he entered the service of the colonial administration in 1889, and therefore demonstrates that his motivation in writing favourably of the Dutch was not just in appeasement to his European superiors. Al-tuffāḥa l-wardiyya is an edifying work that, in line with th…

‘The precious gems dealing with the explanation of current topics’ Aḥmad ibn Zaynī Daḥlān Date: 1892 Original Language: Arabic DescriptionA number of fatwas issued by Aḥmad Daḥlān and other scholars dealing with the colonial presence of the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies are brought together in this bilingual compilation (the Arabic original and its Malay rendering) made by an unknown compiler. The individual fatwas are not dated, but those by Daḥlān necessarily date from before 1886, the year of his death. A key text is a brief fatwa in which Daḥlān is asked about the…

Each of the four divisions of the year (spring, summer, autumn, and winter), marked by particular weather patterns and daylight hours. Arabia, the cradle of Islam, has different seasons, notably a suffocatingly hot summer, while in the higher places it can be bitterly cold during the winter. In spring and autumn many days ¶ are mild. There is no word for season in the Qurʾān. The word mawsim (pl. mawāsim) occurs in ḥadīth (see ḥadīth and the qurʾān ) in the sense of market or fair, mostly combined with a pilgrimage (q.v.; ḥajj) to a sanctuary, like those held in various places in pre-I…