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, one of the names of the Prophet Muḥammad and a proper name used by Muslims. Formally, it is the elative of Maḥmūd or Ḥamīd and means “more, or most, worthy of praise”, or, less probably, of Ḥāmid, in which case it would mean "praising [God] to a higher, or the highest, degree”. As a proper name it is, however, distinct from the other, etymologically connected forms, including the name Muḥammad. It occurs occasionally, and less frequently than Muḥammad, among the pre-Islamic Arabs. In the Ṣafāi…

, Abu ’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿUmar , a famous S̲h̲āfiʿī scholar and polemicist of the 3rd/9th century. His grandfather, Surayd̲j̲ (d. 235/849-50), had been a pious traditionist (Ibn Tag̲h̲rībirdī, Nud̲j̲ūm , ed. Juynboll, i, 709 f.; Cairo ed., ii, 281 f.). He is considered the most prominent S̲h̲āfiʿī scholar after S̲h̲āfiʿī’s own companions, and some ranked him even higher than al-Muzanī [ q.v.]. His main teacher was ʿUt̲h̲mān b. Saʿīd al-Anmāṭī (d. 288/901), a disciple of Muzanī. The tradition according to which each century would see a renovator of Islam wa…

(a.), marriage (properly, sexual intercourse, but already in the Ḳurʾān used exclusively of the contract of marriage). In the present article, marriage is dealt with as a legal institution; for marriage customs, see ʿurs . I. In Classical Islamic Law 1. The essential features of the Muslim law of marriage go back to the customary law of the Arabs which previously existed. In this, although there were differences according to districts and the conditions of the individual cases, the regulations governing marriage were based upon the pa…

, the Ḥanafī mad̲h̲hab or school of religious law, named after Abū Ḥanīfa [ q.v.] al-Nuʿmān b. T̲h̲ābit. It grew out of the main body of the ancient school of Kūfa, and absorbed the ancient school of Baṣra, too. As early as the generation following Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), we find Abū Yūsuf [ q.v.] (d. 182/795) refer to him as “The prominent lawyer” ( Kitāb al-K̲h̲arād̲j̲ . n), and al-S̲h̲aybānī [ q.v.] (d. 189/805) speak of the “followers of Abū Ḥanifa”. S̲h̲āfiʿī [ q.v.] (d. 204/820) refers repeatedly to the followers of Abū Ḥanīfa as a homogeneous group ( Ik̲h̲tilāf al-ḥadit̲h̲ …

, a Muslim theologian, founder of the Egyptian modernist school. Muḥammad ʿAbduh belonged to an Egyptian peasant family and was born in 1849 in Lower Egypt. He spent his childhood in the little village of Maḥallat Naṣr in the mudīriyya of Buḥayra in Lower Egypt, where his father had returned to his land. When Muḥammad ʿAbduh had learned the Ḳurʾān by heart, he was sent in 1862 to the theological school of Ṭanṭā but he left this after a year-and-a-half, ¶ discouraged, and was only induced to resume his studies through the influence of a grand-uncle who aroused in him an inte…

b. T̲h̲ābit , theologian and religious lawyer, the eponym of the school of the Ḥanafīs [ q.v.]. He died in 150/767 at the age of 70, and was therefore born about the year 80/699. His grandfather Zūṭā is said to have been brought as a slave from Kābul to Kūfa, and set free by a member of the Arabian tribe of Taym-Allāh b. T̲h̲aʿlaba; he and his descendants became thus clients ( mawlā ) of this tribe, and Abū Ḥanīfa is occasionally called al-Taymī. Very little is known of his life, except that he lived in Kūfa as a manufacturer and merchant of a kind of silk material ( k̲h̲azz ). It …

, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. ʿĀṣim al-G̲h̲arnāṭī , a famous Mālikī jurisconsult, grammarian and man of letters. He was born in Granada on 12 D̲j̲umādā I 760/11 April 1359 and died there on 11 S̲h̲awwāl 829/15 August 1426. He had a brother, who was also called Muḥammad but had the kunya Abū Yaḥyā, and a son who also had the kunya Abū Yaḥyā; this last was the author of a ¶ Memorandum on the members of his family (Aḥmad Bābā, Nayl , 285). Ibn ʿĀṣim came of a family of scholars which belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of Granad…

S̲h̲ams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Miṣrī , also known as Ibn al-G̲h̲arābīlī, a S̲h̲āfiʿī scholar and commentator, d. 918/1512. He was born and grew up in G̲h̲azza, and was a disciple of Ḏj̲alāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī (d. 864/1459; Brockelmann, II, 138, S II, 140), but little else is known of his life. The following works of his have survived: 1. Fatḥ al-ḳarīb al-mud̲j̲īb , or al-Ḳawl al-muk̲h̲tār fī s̲h̲arḥ G̲h̲āyat al-ik̲h̲tiṣār , a commentary on the Muk̲h̲taṣar , or Taḳrīb , or G̲h̲āyat al-ik̲h̲tiṣār of Abū S̲h̲ud̲j̲āʿ [ q.v.]; editio princeps, Būlāḳ 1271, very often reprinted, a…

(a.), originally “understanding, knowledge, intelligence”, and applied to any branch of knowledge (as in fiḳh al-lug̲h̲a , the science of lexicography), has become the technical term for jurisprudence, the science of religious law in Islam. It is, like the iurisprudentia of the Romans, rerum divinarum atque humanarum notifia and in its widest sense covers all aspects of religious, political and civil life. In addition to the laws regulating ritual and religious observances ( ʿibādāt ), containing orders and prohibitions, it includes the whole fie…

, nisba of several authors originating from one of the places called Aḳ Ḥisār. To Aḳ Ḥiṣār in Aydi̊n belong: (a) Ilyās b. ʿIsā, commonly called, ibn ʿīsā b. mad̲j̲d al-dīn , author of a Turkish book of prophecies ( Kas̲h̲f-i Rumūz-i Kunūz ) which, composed in 965/1557-8 when the Ottomans had reached the summit of their power, foretold the continuation of their empire until the end of the world and, from the numerical value of the letters of proper names, predicted the fate of the nation until the year 2035 A.H. (Cf. Pertsch, Cat . Berlin , No. 45, 9; Krafft, Cat. Vienna Acad ., No. 301; Flügel, Cat. Vie…

(a.), killing, putting to death, used in the two principal meanings of the word — the crime of murder and the punishment of execution. I. Ḳatl as a crime. 1). In the Ḳurʾān unlawful slaying is forbidden in a series of verses, which date from the second Mekkan period to nearly the end of the Medīna period. The passages may be arranged chronologically as follows (cf. Th. Nöldeke-Fr. Schwally, Geschichte des Qorāns, vol. i., and H. Grimme, Mohammed, vol. ii.; when the exact order in the particular periods cannot be ascertained, the passages are here arranged in the order of…

al-Iṣfahānī Abū Sulaymān , the imām of the school of the Ẓāhiriyya ([ q.v.]; also called Dāwūdiyya) in religious law. An extreme representative of the tendency hostile to human reasoning and relying exlusively on Ḳurʾān and ḥadīt̲h̲, Dāwūd not only rejected personal opinion ( raʾy ) as al-S̲h̲āfiʿī [ q.v.] had done, but, as far as he could, systematic reasoning by analogy ( ḳiyās ) which al-S̲h̲āfiʿī had admitted and tried to regularize, and he made it his principle to follow the outward or literal meaning ( ẓāhir ) of Ḳurʾān and ḥadīt̲h̲ exclusively; he also restricted the concept of …

Ibrāhim b. Ḵh̲ālid b. Abi ’l-Yamān al-Kalbī , prominent jurisconsult and founder of a school of religious law, died in Bag̲h̲dād in Ṣafar 240/July 854. Living in ʿIrāḳ one generation after al-S̲h̲āfiʿī. Abū T̲h̲awr seems to have been influenced by al-S̲h̲āfiʿī’s methodological insistence on the authority of the ḥadīt̲h̲ of the Prophet, without, however, renouncing the use of raʾy [ q.v.], as had been customary in the ancient schools of law. The later biographers represented this as a conversion on the part of Abū T̲h̲awr from the raʾy of the ancient ʿIrāḳians to the school of al-S…

, also aṣḥāb al-ḥadīt̲h̲ , the partisans of traditions [see ḥadīth]. Traditionalism in Islam manifested itself first in the re-emergence of the old Arabian concept of sunna [ q.v.], the normative custom of the community, which was in due course identified with the sunna of the Prophet. This normative custom found its expression in the "living tradition" of the ancient schools of religious law, which came into being at the very beginning of the second century of Islam. In opposition to the ancient schools and their extensive use of human reasoning and personal opinion [see aṣḥāb al-raʾy and r…

(a.). Inheritance (pl. mawārīt̲h̲ ) ; wārit̲h̲ the heir, mūrit̲h̲ the person leaving the estate. This branch of Islamic law is also called ʿilm al-farāʾiḍ “the science of the ordained quotas” (cf. sūra IV, II) after its most important and most difficult part. 1. In pre-modern times i. In keeping with the patriarchal system prevailing among the Arabs, the estate of a deceased tribesman went ab intestato to the nearest male relative(s); the order of succession in which these relatives, the socalled ʿaṣaba (corresponding to agnati ), were called upon to inherit…

, ʿAbd Allāh b. Yūsuf Abu Muḥammad , a S̲h̲āfiʿī scholar, father of ʿAbd al-Malik [see the following art.], lived for most of his life in Nīsābūr, and died there in 438/1047. As an author, he was mainly concerned with the literary form of furūḳ , on which see Schacht, in Islamica , ii/4, 1927, 505 ff. (J. Schacht) Bibliography al-Subkī, Ṭabaḳāt, iii, 208-19 W. Wüstenfeld, Der Imâm el-Schâfiʾi, etc., no. 365 (a), 248 ff. Brockelmann, I, 482 S I, 667.

(a.), in Islamic law, an oath which gives a husband the possibility of accusing his wife of adultery without legal proof and without his becoming liable to the punishment prescribed for this, ¶ and the possibility also of denying the paternity of a child borne by the wife. “In the language of the S̲h̲arīʿa , evidence given by the husband, strengthened by oaths, by which the husband invokes the curse ( laʿna: from this the whole process is a potiori named) and the wife the wrath of Allāh upon themselves, if they should lie; it frees the husband from ḥadd [ q.v.] (the legal punishment) for ḳad̲h̲f [ q.v…

(a.), synonymous with ḳawad , retaliation (“settlement”, not “cutting off” or “prosecution”), according to Muslim law is applied in cases of killing, and of wounding which do not prove fatal, called in the former case ḳiṣāṣ fi ’l-nafs (blood-vengeance) and in the latter ḳiṣāṣ fī-mā dūn al-nafs . For ḳiṣāṣ among the pagan Arabs see Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums2 , 186 ff.; Procksch, Über die Blutrache bei den vorislamischen Arabern und Mohammeds Stellung zu ihr; the collection of essays Zum ältesten Strafrecht der Kulturvo…

(a.), difference, also inconsistency; as a technical term, the differences of opinion amongst the authorities of religious law, both between the several schools and within each of them; opp. id̲j̲māʾ , ittifāḳ . The ancient schools of law, on the one hand, accepted geographical differences of doctrines as natural; on the other hand, they voiced strong objections to disagreement within each school, an opinion which was mitigated by their acceptance as legitimate of different opinions if based on id̲j̲tihād . The rising tide of traditions from the Prop…

, abū ʿamr ʿabd al-raḥmān b. ʿamr , the main representative of the ancient Syrian school of religious law. His nisba is derived from al-Awzāʿ, a suburb of Damascus, so called after a South Arabian tribe, or an agglomeration ( awzāʿ ) of clans, who lived there (Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīk̲h̲ . Dimas̲h̲ḳ , ed. al-Munad̲j̲d̲j̲id, ii, 1954, 144; Yāḳūt, ¶ i, 403 f.). An ancestor of his had been made a prisoner in Yaman (al-Masʿūdī, Murūd̲j̲ , vi, 214). He seems to have been born in Damascus, and he did part of his studies at least in al-Yamāma, where he went in…