, colloquially also Falasṭīn, an Arabic adaptation of the classical Palestine (Greek Παλαιστίνη Latin Palaestina), the land of the Philistines. The name was used by Herodotus (i, 105; ii, 106; iii, 91; iv, 39) and other Greek and Latin authors to designate the Philistine coastlands and sometimes also the territory east of it as far as the Arabian desert. After the suppression of the Jewish revolts in 70 and 132-5 A.D. and the consequent reduction in the Jewish population the name Syria Palaestin…

, one of the common Arabic terms (with d̲j̲und and ʿaskar ) for the army. ¶ i. — Classical . Except possibly in the Yaman, pre-Islamic Arabia, although living under permanent conditions of minor warfare, knew no armies in the proper meaning of the term apart from those of foreign occupation. Conflicts between tribes brought into action virtually all able-bodied men, but without any military organization, and combats were very often settled by individual feats of arms. The embryo of an army may be said to have appeared with Islam in the expeditions led or prepared by the Prophet, although the d̲…

, ‘political party’. The use of the word ḥizb in the sense of a political party is a recent one, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century or thereabouts, but this modern usage was in a way a natural and legitimate extension of the traditional and classical one (see preceding article). This traditional sense is the one found in the nineteenth-century dictionaries. Thus Kazimirski’s Dictionnaire (1860) defined ḥizb as a ‘troupe d’hommes’; Lane’s Lexicon (1863 et seq.) as a ‘party or company of men, assembling themselves on account of an event that has befallen them’; Bustānī’s Muḥīṭ…

, the name used by the mediaeval Muslim writers for the modern river Yarkon which runs into the Mediterranean through Tel Aviv about 5 km. to the north of Jaffa. In the Bible it is called Me Yarkon , probably “the Green Waters” (Joshua, xix. 46). In the later Middle Ages and in modern times, the river assumes a new Arabic name, that of Nahr al-ʿAwd̲j̲āʾ, “the Crooked River”. The Crusaders called it “La Grand Rivière” (G. A. Smith, The historical geography of the Holy Land 4, London 1897, 116 n. 6). The name Abū Fuṭrus is the Arabic corruption of Antipatris, the fortress and town built …

, “the plain of the Banū ʿĀmir”, the largest of its kind in Palestine, named after the Arabian tribe ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa [ q.v.], parts of which reached Palestine after the Arab conquests and settled there. Stretching between the mountains of Nābulus and those of Galilee, it constituted an important link on the Cairo-Damascus highway. Ever since the Neolithic era, it has encompassed fortified urban centres, some of which (e.g. Megiddo) flourished in biblical times. Its strategic location turned it into a scene of crucial…

, Yāfa , conventionally Jaffa, older Joppa, a port on the Palestinian seaboard, in pre-modern times the port of entry for Jerusalem, since 1950 part of the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo in the State of Israel (lat. 32° 05′ N., long. 34° 46′ E.). Situated on a 30 m/100 feet-high promontory on the otherwise straight coastline of central Palestine, Jaffa is a very ancient town. Thutmosis III’s forces seized the Canaanite town of ϒ-pw in the 15th century B.C. and it became a provincial capital during the Egyptian New Kingdom; since the 1950s, archaeological excavations h…

The mandate (Arabic intidāb ; Turkish manda , from the French) was essentially a systemoftrusteeship, instituted by the League of Nations after the end of the First World War, for the ¶ administration of certain territories detached from the vanquished states, chiefly the Ottoman and German Empires. The concept of the mandate has been variously understood as either a new world order or, contrariwise, merely as a façade for neo-colonialism, with other interpretations ranging between these two extremes. Essentially, the option …

, a small city surrounding the ruins of a once impressive fortress in the hilly region of northern Palestine, 40 km east of ʿAkkā [ q.v.] and 20 km north of Ṭabariyya [ q.v.]. The fortress is situated at the summit of a hill ca. 840 m high, and enjoys a fine view of the surrounding area, including the Sea of Galilee to the east. In the Crusader period, Ṣafad was an important Templar stronghold; in the Mamlūk period it served as the capital of a province ( mamlaka ), while under the Ottomans it was the centre of a sand̲j̲aḳ [ q.v.]. Today it is the principal town of the upper Galilee region in th…

, one of the two subdivisions of Muḍar, which along with Rabīʿa was reckoned as constituting the sons of ʿAdnān, the so-called Northern Arabs [see d̲j̲azīrat al-ʿarab ]. The other subdivision of Muḍar was K̲h̲indif or al-Yās. ʿAylān is sometimes said to be the father of Ḳays, but it is more likely that the double name means “Ḳays (owner) of ʿAylān” (sc. a horse, dog or slave). The following is an abbreviated genealogical table: ¶ Ḳays ʿAylān does not appear to have functioned as a unit before Islam, and in the accounts of “the days of the Arabs” o…

, the Arabic name of Lydda, the ancient Hebrew Lodd, a town in Palestine to the south-east of Jaffa (Yāfā, Yāfo) and 17 km. in direct line from the Mediterranean shore. Ancient history. Ludd is extremely ancient, and its name is believed to appear in the list of towns conquered by the Egyptian King Thutmos III ( ca. 1468-1436 B.C.) (cf. Alt, Essays , 138; Aharoni, 149). The name of Lodd appears four times in the later books of the Bible (I Chron. viii, 12, the building of the city by several families belonging to the tribe of Benjamin;…

b. Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn , second Ṭūlūnid ruler of Egypt and Syria. He was born in Sāmarrā in 250/864 and, after the abortive rebellion of his brother ʿAbbās [ q.v. in Suppl.] against Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn [ q.v.], was designated heir-apparent as early as 269/882. In an unprecedented act in the history of Muslim Egypt, the popular K̲h̲umārawayh came to power upon the death of his father on 10 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḳaʿda 270/10 May 884 without the caliph’s sanction, but rather with the general approval of the military and civil authorities of the Ṭūlūnid régi…

, seventh caliph of the Umayyad dynasty [ q.v.], r. 96-9/715-17, born probably in Medina about 55/675, son of the subsequent caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān [ q.v.] and of Wallāda bt. al-ʿAbbās b. D̲j̲azʾ from the Banū ʿAbs, a tribe considered part of the Northern Arabian confederation of the G̲h̲aṭafān [ q.v.]. There is almost no substantial information on the first three decades of Sulaymān’s life. It is likely that he came to Syria during the initial stage of the Second Civil War (60-73/680-92) in the company of other members of the Marwānid branch [ q.v.] of the Umayyads emigrating thit…

, the Arabic name for the Jordan River, used also from early Islamic times onwards to designate the regions adjacent to the river’s course. 1. The river This appears in Arabic as the nahr al-Urdunn , in Old Testament and later Hebrew as ha-ϒardēn , and in the Septuagint and the classical geographers as ô ’Ιορδάνης. After the Crusading period, local Arabic usage often referred to it as al-S̲h̲arīʿa [ al-kabīra ] “the [Great] watering-place”. It was, and still is, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims, by Christians in particular on account of…

, the most common Arabic name for Jerusalem. A. History 1. The Islamic history of Jerusalem clearly falls into three periods. During the first six hundred years, the possession of the city was contested between Islam and Christianity and between many Islamic princes and factions. After the bloodless and poorly-recorded delivery of the town into the hands of an inconspicuous tribal commander, the history of the period was solemnly inaugurated by the erection of the marvellous Dome of the Rock, the majestic testimony ¶ to the Islamic presence in the Holy City; it culminated in t…

, Syria, etymologically, “the left-hand region”, because in ancient Arab usage the speaker in western or central Arabia was considered to face the rising sun and to have Syria on his left and the Arabian peninsula, with Yaman (“the rig̲h̲thand region”), on his right (cf. al-Masʿūdī, Murūd̲j̲ ., iii, 140-1 = § 992; al-Muḳaddasī, partial French tr. A. Miquel, La meilleure répartition pour la connaissance des provinces , Damascus 1963, 155-6, both with other, fanciful explanations). In early Islamic usage, the term bilād al-S̲h̲ām covered what in early 20th-…

(a.). 1. Ḳurʾānic and early Arabic usage. Sid̲j̲ill is an Arabic word for various types of documents, especially of an official or juridical nature. It has long been recognised (first, it seems, by Fraenkel) that it goes back ultimately to Latin sigillum , which in the classical language means “seal” (i.e. both “sealmatrix” and “seal-impression”), but which in Mediaeval Latin is used also for the document to which a seal has been affixed; it was borrowed into Byzantine Greek as σιγίλλ(ι)ον, “seal, treaty, imperial edict”, and then, via Aramaic (e.g. Syriac sygylywn …

or Ṣaḥāfa (a.), the written press, journalism, the profession of the journalist ( ṣaḥāfī ). The nineteen-fifties witnessed the attainment of national independencies and major political upheavals, such as the Egyptian revolution of 23 July 1952. The Arabic press which, paradoxically, enjoyed great success during the colonial period [see d̲j̲arīda. i], despite the somewhat repressive nature of judicial regulation of the press (since what was seen was the proliferation of a press of information, of ideas and even of warfare), developed in conjunct…

, the name of two places in Persia. I. Tihrān, a city of northern Persia. 1. Geographical position. 2. History to 1926. 3. The growth of Tihrān. (a). To ca 1870. (b). Urbanisation, monuments, cultural and socioeconomic life until the time of the Pahlavīs. (c). Since the advent of the Pahlavīs. II. Tihrān, the former name of a village or small town in the modern province of Iṣfahān. I. Tihrān, older form (in use until the earlier 20th century) Ṭihrān (Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iv, 51, gives both forms, with Ṭihrān as the head word; al-Samʿānī, Ansāb , ed. Ḥaydarābād, i…