, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim [see al-kabtawrī ].

, Abū Ḏj̲aʿfar Amad b. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Sayyid , Spanish-Arabic pharmaco-botanist, native of the fortress G̲h̲āfiḳ near Cordova. His dates are not known, but he may have died around the middle of the 6th/12th century. He was considered to be the best expert on drugs of his time; he elaborated thoroughly the material transmitted from Dioscurides and Galen and presented it in a concise, but appropriately complete form in his Kïtāb al-Adwiya al-mufrada . According to Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa ( ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ ii, 133, 14), Ibn al-Bayṭār was accustomed to take…

, Muhammad b. Ḳassūm b. Aslam , Spanish-Arab scholar and oculist, probably of the 6th/12th century. The Arabic chroniclers are silent with regard to his biography and we know almost nothing of his life. It has been no more than supposed that he was born in Cordova and that he practised for a long time in this city. According to Wüstenfeld, he was the father of Abū Ḏj̲aʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-G̲h̲āfiḳī [ q.v. in Supplement], the famous doctor and pharmacologist, author of the Kitāb al-Adwiya al-mufrada . Of Muḥammad al-G̲h̲āfiḳī, there remains only the Kitāb al-Murs̲h̲id fi’ l-kuḥl …

, governor of al-Andalus. He succeeded Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-As̲h̲d̲j̲aʿī in this office at the end of III or at the beginning of 112/730, and retained it until his death in 114/732. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, who had already governed Spain provisionally for about two months in 102/721, was a tābiʿ reputed for his piety. He is chiefly famous for the incursion into Gaul that cost him his life. His expedition, which was carefully prepared, had for its object the basilica of St. Martin at Tours. He collected a numerous army, and from Pamplona marched th…

al-Fihrī , governor of al-Andalus. He succeeded in this office ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbd Allāh al-G̲h̲āfiḳī [ q.v.], when the latter was killed during his expedition into Gaul, 114/732. He had to surrender his office, in 116/734, to ʿUḳba b. al-Ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲ād̲j̲ al-Salūlī, but resumed it in 123/740. Belonging to the Medinese party, he evinced a rather unfavourable attitude towards the caliph of Damascus. Almost at once, however, he was confronted with grave difficulties caused by the Berbers who revolted in the Iberi…

, Abu Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad al-Dīn b. al-Bayṭār al-Mālaḳī , botanist and pharmacologist, born in Malaga at the end of the 6th/12th century. He probably belonged to the family of the same name whose existence in Malaga is attested by Ibn al-Abbār ( Muʿd̲j̲am , nos. 35, 165, 241). He studied in Seville and collected plants in the districts round the town with his teachers Abu ’l-ʿAbbās al-Nabātī, ʿAbd Allāh b. Ṣāliḥ and Abu ’l-Ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲ād̲j̲. In about 617/1220 he emigrated to the East: after crossing North Africa…

, also nīlad̲j̲ (Persian, from Skr. nīla “blue”) is Indigo tinctoria L., Indigoferae , the oldest known organic dye. It is the main component of natural indigo, which can be obtained from various kinds of indigofera ( Isatis tinctoria, Cruciferae ) and from the knotweed ( Polygonum tinctorium, Polygonaceae ). For thousands of years indigo has been used in India, China, as well as in Egypt, to paint and dye various fabrics. Classical antiquity knew indigo as a medicine; the Arabs cultivated the plant and produced the dye themselves. The Arab translators of Dioscurides did not find an…

, abu ’l-ḳāsim ʿammār b. ʿalī , one of the most famous, and certainly the most original of Arab oculists. He lived first in ʿIrāḳ, then in Egypt; he travelled widely, as he himself informs us in his book, and on his travels, which took him to Ḵh̲urāsān in one direction, to Palestine and Egypt in the other, he practised his profession and performed operations. His work on ophthalmology was composed in Egypt, in the reign of al-Ḥākim (996/1020); thus he was a contemporary ¶ of the more famous, but less original, oculist ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā [ q.v.]. If ʿAlī’s Tad̲h̲kira became for …

, Yūsuf ( Yünus ?) b. Isḥāḳ al-Isrāʾīlī , Judaeo-Arab physician and pharmacist who lived in Almeria ca. 1100 A.D. There he wrote the K. al-Mustaʿīnī for al-Mustaʿīn billāh Abū D̲j̲aʿfar Aḥmad b. Yūsuf al-Muʾtamin billāh (reigned 478-503/1085-1109), the Hūdid ruler of Saragossa [see hūdids ], after whom the work was named. The book must have attracted attention immediately, for it is often quoted by al-G̲h̲āfiḳī [ q.v. above], a younger contemporary of Ibn Biklāris̲h̲, in his K. al-Adwiya al-mufrada ; in the Latin version of the latter under the name Bu…

or more often Sawsan , iris or lily; generally Iris florentina L., or Lilium sp. Of Middle Persian origin, from sōsan , it is related to Hebrew s̲h̲ūs̲h̲an , and is possibly originally a loan-word from Egyptian (I. Löw, Die Flora der Juden , Vienna-Leipzig 1924-34, ii, 1-4, 160-84). The sūsan asmānd̲j̲ūnī (Pers. āsmān-gūnī “sky-coloured”) was the blue iris; other colours were white and yellow. In the Arabic Dioscorides, īrisā , a “type” of sawsan , is equated with the Greek iris; zahr al-sawsan with lily ( krinon ) (see M.M. Sadek, The Arabic materia of Dioscorides , Q…

, an arabicised Persian word, originally from the Sanskrit, denoting a narcotic drug, more exactly the henbane ( hyoscyamus ). The meaning of the Sanskrit bhaṇgā is really “hemp” ( cannabis sativa L.), i.e., the variety which grows in southern climes which contains in the tip of its leaves an intoxicating resinons substance (Arabic ḥas̲h̲īs̲h̲ ), whence the Zend banha “drunkenness”. In Persian the loanword bang was applied to the henbane and for this reason Ḥunayn b. Isḥāḳ, in his Arabic translation of the Materia medica of Dioscorides, (c. 235/850) equated…

, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar al-G̲h̲āfiḳī al-Andalusī , a student of the Spanish astronomer and mathematician Maslama al-Mad̲j̲rīṭī [ q.v.], lived in Cordova until shortly after the outbreak of civil strife, at which time he moved to Denia where he died in 426/1035. Ṣāʿid al-Andalusī (d. 462/1070) informs us that Ibn al-Ṣaffār wrote a set of astronomical tables according to the Sindhind method as well as a treatise on the use of the astrolabe. The former seems to survive only partially in an Arabic manuscript written in Hebrew characters (MS Paris, hebr …

, Persian dahna , dahāna , marmar-i sabz (‘green marble’), Turkish dehne-i frengi, malachite, the well known green copper-ore. The description of the mineral in the Rasāʾil Ik̲h̲wān al-Ṣafā goes back to the pseudo-Aristotelian lapidary. According to that, the malachite is formed in copper mines from the sulphur fumes which combine with ¶ copper to form layers. Its colour is compared to that of the chrysolith ( zabard̲j̲ad ), although it does appear in different shades: dark green, veined, the shade of peacock’s feathers, and pale green, wit…

, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim K̲h̲alaf b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-G̲h̲āfiḳī , poet and letter-writer, from the island in the Guadalquivir called Ḳabtawra or Ḳabtūra (formerly Caput Tauri, Ibn K̲h̲aldūn—de Slane, Hist . des Berbères , ii, 113; today Isla Mayor, south of Seville). The son of a Sevillian scholar, he was born in S̲h̲awwāl 615/December 1218-January 1219. After the fall of Seville (646/1248) he moved to Ceuta, where he became head of the chancellery of the ʿAzafid emirate; following the death of the amīr Abu ’l-Ḳāsim al-ʿAzafī he left Ceuta for Tunis and there taught ḥadīt̲h̲ …

, Abū ’l-ʿAbbas (sporadically: Abu D̲j̲aʿfar) Aḥmad b. Abī ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Mufarrid̲j̲ b. Abi ’l-Ḵh̲alīl ʿAbd Allāh al-Umawī al-Ḥazmī al-Ẓāhirī al-Nabātī al-ʿAs̲h̲s̲h̲āb , Spanish-Arabic pharmacobotanist. He was born in Seville in 561/1166 (according to others, 567/1172) and died there in 637/1240. His allegedly Byzantine origin on the maternal side may have procured him the nickname by which he became known, but which he did not like hearing. In any case, he was a freedman of the Umayyads.…

an expression used by the Arab historians for the Battle of Poitiers, which was fought between Charles Martel, at the head of the Christian Frankish armies, and the governor of Muslim Spain ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAbd Allāh al-G̲h̲āfiḳī in Ramaḍān 114/October 732. Neither the name of Poitiers nor that of Tours are mentioned by the Arab authors of the Middle Ages. As for the expression Balāṭ al-s̲h̲uhudāʾ , its occurrence is only recorded from the 5th/11th century onwards and only in Andalusian historians: Ibn Ḥayyān (died 469/1075), quoted by al-Maḳḳarī, Nafḥ al-Ṭīb , …

, Bezoar, a remedy against all kinds of poisons, highly esteemed and paid for throughout the Middle Ages up to the 18th century, and in the Orient even up to this very day. The genuine (Oriental) Bezoar-stone is obtained from the bezoargoat ( Capra aegagrus Gm.) and, according to the investigations of Friedrich Wöhler, the famous chemist (1800-1882), and others, it is a gall-stone. The stone seems to have been unknown to ancient Arabs, for neither in the lexica nor in A. Siddiqi, Studien über die persischen Fremdwörter im klassischen Arabisch , 1919, is the word …

, pl. of dawāʾ , every substance which may affect the constitution of the human body, every drug used as a remedy or a poison. In accordance with Greek ideas, Muslim pharmacologists distinguished between simple drugs, adwiya mufrada (φάρμακα ἁπλᾶ) and compound drugs, adwiya murakkaba (φ․ σύνθετα), [for the latter see aḳrābād̲h̲īn ]. According to their origin, the adwiya were divided into vegetable ( nabātiyya ), animal ( ḥayawāniyya ) and mineral ( maʿdiniyya ). Like medicine in general, Muslim pharmacology depends on Greek learning. An element of Persian tradition is …

, “Plain of the oaktrees” or, more accurately, “of the acorns” ( ballūṭ ) whose present name Los Pedroches is applied to the wide valley situated to the south-west of Oreto, three days’ journey north of Cordova. It stretches as far as the mountains of Almadén and has always been characterized by the great mass of evergreen oaks covering the mountains and the high plateau. Pedroche is synonymous with pedregal , the designation of the whole region, and the Latin name petra , transcribed into Arabic as biṭra , has, with the suffix che , given Biṭraws̲h̲. In common with…

was the best known oculist ( kaḥḥāl ) of the Arabs. His work, the Tad̲h̲kirat al-Kaḥḥālīn , deserves the greater claim to our attention from the point of view of the history of civilization in that it is the oldest Arabic work on ophthalmology, that is complete and survives in the original. The name of the author is also recorded in the inverted form: ’Īsā b. ʿAlī. Preference is to be given to the first form as follows from a reference in Ibn Abī Uṣaibiʿa ( ʿUyūn al-Anbāʾ , i, 240) and from quotations in later authors as al-G̲h̲āfiḳī, Ḵh̲alīfa b. Abi ’l-Maḥāsi…