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, a former native state of the British Indian empire. It lies in the south-east of Balūčistān, along the coast to the west of Karachi, between lats. 24° 54′ and 26° 39′ N. and longs, 64° 7′ and 67° 29′ E. It is bounded on the west by Makrān [ q.v.] (of which western Las Bēla forms indeed a part), on the north by the Jhalāwān district of the former Kalāt native state [see kilāt ] and on the east by the former province of Sind; its area, both as a former native state and as a modern District of Pakistan (see below) is 6,441 sq. miles. 1. Geography. The central part of the state is a flat, arid plain ( las …

“the land of the Mongols”, the name used from the time of the Mongols (13th century) onwards to designate the steppe, plateau and mountain region of Inner Asia lying to the north of Transoxania or Mā warāʾ al-nahr [ q.v.] and the Syr Darya, hence including inter alia the region of Semirečiye, Turkish Yeti-su “the land of seven rivers”, which comprised the basins of the Ili and Ču rivers [ q.vv.]; this part of Mog̲h̲olistān corresponds in large measure with the modern Kazakh SSR. But the region also extended eastwards across the Tien Shan and Ala Tau ranges into th…

, the Arabic name for Talas , a river of Central Asia and a town of pre-Islamic and early Islamic times on its bank. The exact site is unknown, but was probably near the later Awliyā ¶ Atā/Aulie Ata, modern Dzhambul. This last is now just within the Kazakhstan Republic, but the old name Talas has been revived for a modern settlement some distance to the east, on the left bank of the Talas River and just within Kirghizia. The original Talas certainly lay in the river valley, between two mountain ranges which run westwards and end in the Aḳ Ḳum desert. The valley carried an important trade route e…

, Is̲h̲tīk̲h̲an , a town and district of mediaeval Islamic Transoxania. It lay seven farsak̲h̲ s north of Samarḳand and was administratively separate from it. There were many arable fields, irrigated by a canal taken off the Zarafs̲h̲an river [ q.v.]. In the 4th/10th century, the town had a citadel, a s̲h̲ahristān and a rabaḍ or suburb; a village of the same name exists on the site today. When the Arabs took over Samarḳand in the second quarter of the 8th century A.D., the Ik̲h̲s̲h̲īds of Sogdia transferred their capital to Is̲h̲tīk̲h̲an. In the 3rd/9th century …

(a.). 1. In Islamic law, this means the rescission of a sale or transaction (synonym, mutāraka ); see for lexical aspects of the term, LA 1, x, 282; TA 1, v, 535; Freytag, Lexicon , iv, 476. 2. In mediaeval Eastern Islamic administrative usage, it denotes the contract of service of officials, in accordance with the term’s further meaning of “the laying down of conditions for an agreement with some one”. We possess the texts of two muwāḍaʿa s made by early Ghaznavid viziers with their sovereign: one made by Aḥmad b. Ḥasan al-Maymandī [ q.v.] with Sultan Masʿūd b. Maḥmūd [ q.v.] on his appointment…

, a town of mediaeval Persia, in what later became known as Luristān [ q.v.], and the chef-lieu of the district of Mihrad̲j̲ānkad̲h̲aḳ. A tributary of the Kark̲h̲ā, which flows into the Kārūn river [ q.v.], is still today known as the Saymareh. The district passed peacefully into the hands of Abū Mūsā al-As̲h̲ʿarī’s Arab troops (al-Balād̲h̲urī, Futūḥ , 307), and in mediaeval times prospered as a meetingplace of Arab, Persian and Lur ethnic elements, apart from the devastations of a severe earthquake in 258/872 (al-Ṭabarī, iii, 187…

, a town and an extensive district of mediaeval Islamic Central Asia, identifiable with the later Islamic town of Sayram. Popular etymologising saw in the name the Persian component sipīd , ispīd “white”. It lay on the Aris river, a right-bank affluent of the Si̊r Daryā [ q.v.], 14 km/8 miles to the east of the later town of Chimkent (lat. 42° 16′ N., long. 69° 05′ E.); Chimkent itself, now in the southernmost part of the Kazakhstan Republic, is mentioned in the historical sources from Tīmūrid times onwards, e.g. in S̲h̲araf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī. Isfīd̲j̲āb apparently had a pre-Islamic histo…

, modern Tkish. Yeşil Irmak (“the Green River”), a river of northern Anatolia, the classical Iris in the province of Pontus (see PW, ix/2, col. 2045). The upper course of the river, called the Tozanli Su, rises in the Köse Dağ to the northeast of Sivas and flows westwards by Tokat [ q.v.] and Turhal. Here there is a fertile plain, the Kazova or “Goose Plain”, which is now irrigated by waters from the Almus dam on the river’s course above it, completed in 1966, and a canal running off and parallel to the river, enabling cereals, sugar-beet and vin…

, a small town of western Persia (lat. 33° 29’ N., long. 51° 57’ E., altitude 1,372 m/4,500 feet) on the lower, southeastern slopes of the Kūh-i Kargas mountains and just off the modern Tehran—Ḳum— Kās̲h̲ān—Yazd road. The early Islamic geographers do not mention it, but Yāḳūt, Muʿd̲j̲am , v, 292, describes it as a small town, administratively dependent on Iṣfahān and in the province of D̲j̲ibāl [ q.v.], and situated 20 farsak̲h̲s to the north of Iṣfahān; and Mustawfī (8th/14th century) describes it as protected by the nearby fortress of Was̲h̲ā…

(a.), a tree that figures in Islamic eschatology as growing in Hell, with bitter fruit which the damned are condemned to eat. It is mentioned in the Ḳurʾān three times (XXXVII, 60/62; XLIV, 43; LVI, 52). The lexicographers explain it as an evil-smelling tree that grows in the Tihāma, but also as a medically beneficial one that grows in the Jordan valley around Jericho; and as a foodstuff of the Arabs, composed of fresh butter with dates (see Lane, 1239a-b). Richard Bell, The Qurʾān translated, ii, 556 n. 1, cited as a parallel the same word in Syriac meaning “the hogbean”; Bell…

, Tall , the Arabic name for what is now an archaeological site in the Nāṣiriyya liwāʾ or governorate of ʿIrāḳ (lat. 31° 18’ N., long. 45° 40’ E.). It is the Sumerian and Babylonian Uruk, Biblical Erech (Gen. x. 10), one of the leading cities and religious centres of ancient Babylonia, first surveyed by W. K. Loftus in the 1850s. In early Islamic times it seems to have been a minor place in the district of Kaskar, with a reputation in Islamic tradition as being the birthplace of the Patriarch Ibrāhīm or Abraham (although many other places were mentioned for this) (Yāḳūt, Buldān …

(a.), sing, marfiḳ , “bribes, douceurs”, literally, “benefits, favours”. In mediaeval Islamic society, various terms in addition to this are found, such as ras̲h̲wa / ris̲h̲wa , manāla , d̲j̲aʿāla , hadiyya , etc., with varying degrees of euphemism, for the inducements given either directly to a potential bestower of benefits or as an inducement for a person’s intercession or mediation ( s̲h̲afāʿa , wasāṭa ). In the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, this form of bribery became institutionalised in the caliphate of al-Muḳtadir (295-320/908-32 [ q.v.]), when the vizier Ibn al-Furāt [ q.v.] institute…

, one of the major rivers of Siberia, which flows from sources in the Altai Mountains to the Gulf of Ob and the Kara Sea of the Arctic Ocean. Its course is 3,680 km/2,287 miles long and 5,410 km/3,362 miles long if its main left-bank affluent, the Irtysh [see irtis̲h̲ in Suppl.] is included. Its whole basin covers a huge area of western Siberia. In early historic times, the lands along the lower and middle Ob were thinly peopled with such groups as the Samoyeds and the Ugrian Voguls and Ostiaks (in fact, the indigenous population of these regions today, only…

(t.), from older Turkish yug̲h̲ur -, Ottoman yog̲h̲urmaḳ / yoǧurmak “to knead [dough, etc.], yoghourt, a preparation of soured milk made in the pastoralist, more temperate northern tier of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans, appearing as yog̲h̲urt / yog̲h̲rut in Maḥmūd al-Kās̲h̲g̲h̲arī ( Dīwān lug̲h̲āt al-turk , tr. Atalay, i, 182, ii, 189, iii, 164, 190; Brockelmann, Mitteltürkischer Wortschatz , 92. Cf. also Radloff, Ver such eines Worterbuch der Türk-Dialecte , iii/1, 412-13; Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente im Neupersichen , iv, 173-5 no. 1866; Clauson, An …

, a town, also the centre of a taḥṣīl , in the Meerut [see mīrat́h ] District of northwestern India, now in the Uttar Pradesh State of the Indian Union. The town is situated in lat. 29° 09′ N., long. 77° 36′ E. and lies some 19 km/12 miles to the northwest of Meerut town. ¶ It achieved fame in the later 18th century, when Walter Reinhardt, called Sombre or Samrū, of Luxemburg origin, after having been a mercenary in both French and British service, received from Mīrzā Nad̲j̲af K̲h̲ān, general of the Mug̲h̲al Emperor S̲h̲āh ʿĀlam II [ q.v.], the pargana [ q.v.] of Sardhanā [ q.v.]. This became, after …

(a.), active participle of the form III verb nādā “to call”, hence crier, herald. In the Ḳurʾān, munādī is used (L, 40/41) for the one who will proclaim the Last Day and give the summons to Judgement, in popular Islam usually identified with the angel Isrāfīl [ q.v]; in another context where one might expect it, the story of Joseph, we find instead muʾad̲h̲d̲h̲in used for Joseph’s herald (XII, 70). In the towns of the pre-modern Islamic world, the munādī or town crier performed a vital function of communication in an age when there were no newspapers or, when these did ten…

b. t̲h̲ābit al-anṣārī , poet of Medina and Damascus in the early Islamic period and son of the more famous eulogist of the Prophet, Ḥassān b. T̲h̲ābit [ q.v.]. He seems to have been born in ca. 6/627-8 or 7/628, and apart from visits to the Umayyad capital, to have spent most of his life in Medina. He died there, according to Ibn Ḥad̲j̲ar, Tahd̲h̲īb , vi, 162-3, in ca. 104/722-3 at the age of 98 lunar years, long-lived like his father. ¶ His father had latterly become a strong advocate of vengeance for ʿUt̲h̲mān and a supporter of Muʿāwiya’s cause, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān likewise …

, a town said to be the capital of the king of China in the account of the Arab traveller and littérateur Abū Dulaf Misʿar b. Muhalhil [ q.v.] purporting to describe his participation in an embassy of the Chinese king Ḳālīn b. al-S̲h̲ak̲h̲īr returning from the court of the Samānid amīr Naṣr b. Aḥmad (301-31/914-43 [ q.v.]) at Buk̲h̲ārā. Abū Dulaf describes it as an immense city, one day’s journey across, with walls 90 cubits high and an idol temple bigger than the sacred mosque at Jerusalem ( First Risāla , Fr. tr. G. Ferrand, in Relations de voyages ... relatifs à l’Extrême Orient du VIII e au XVIII e s…

, a people mentioned in the Arabic and Persian historical and geographical sources of the 4th/10th and 5th/11th centuries as dwelling in the Buttaman Mts. at the heads of the valleys running southwards through K̲h̲uttal and Čag̲h̲āniyān down to the course of the upper Oxus. The Ḥudūd al-ʿālam (372/982) describes them as professional brigands and as linked with a smaller group, the Kand̲j̲īna Turks. In fact, these two peoples must be remnants of some earlier waves of invaders from Inner Asia, left behind in the Pamir region, probably of the Hephthalites [see hayāṭila …

, Nawāb , a title used in Muslim India. The form must be a hypercorrection from A. nuwwāb , pl. of nāʾib [ q.v.], used, as often in Persian usage (cf. arbāb “master”, ʿamala “workman”, and see D.C. Phillott, Higher Persian grammar, Calcutta 1919, 65) as a singular. The title was originally granted by the Mug̲h̲al emperors to denote a viceroy or governor of a province, and was certainly current by the 18th century, often in combination with another title, e.g. the Nawāb-Wazīr of Oudh (Awadh), the Nawāb-Nāẓim of Bengal. A nawāb might be subordi…