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The al-Bāʿūnī family originated in the village of Bāʿūna, in what is now northern Jordan. During the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods, the house of al-Bāʿūnī gained fame and social capital in Damascus and neighbouring cities. Al-Maqrīzī reports, on his meeting with Aḥmad al-Bāʿūnī, that their ancestor Nāṣir b. Khalīfa b. Faraj (or Faraḥ), who is said to have been a tailor, moved from his home village to Nazareth when their homeland went through a religious conversion, in which Christian hamlets became Muslim. Nāṣir’s eldest son, ʿImād al-Dīn Ismāʿīl, died in Nazareth, at the age of…

Baalbek (Ar., Baʿlabakk, known in Greek and Roman times as Heliopolis, the city of the sun; Duval 128) is a city and archaeological site in the northern Bekaa (Biqāʿ) valley of Lebanon, a part of the Syrian-African rift. Since the ʿAbbāsid period, initially in narratives of the Islamic conquests (futūḥāt) (Donner), the place has been named in Arabic chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and geographical texts. Its archaeological remains attracted the attention of travellers whose writings spread Baalbek’s fame, as early as the middle Islamic …

Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Jawād al-Iṣfahānī (d. 559/1164), also known by the honorific name of Jāmal al-Dīn, was a vizier of the Zangids who became one of the most intimate friends of ʿImād al-Dīn Zangī (r. 521–41/1127–46). As a close confidant of Zangī he became governor of Naṣībīn and al-Raqqa and was eventually entrusted with general supervision of the entire Zangid empire. As a child al-Jawād al-Iṣfahānī had been carefully educated by his father and at a very early age was given an official appointment in the dīwān al-ʿarḍ (department of the army, a subdivision of the dīwān al-jaysh …