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, a valley some 30 miles/50 km northnorth-east of Mawṣil in ʿIrāḳ, in the ḳaḍāʾ of S̲h̲ayk̲h̲an and in a largely Kurdish mountain area, famed as the principal pilgrimage centre of the Yazīdī sect [see yazīdīs ]. The d̲j̲amāʿiyya of the Yazīdīs is held from the 23th to the 30th September O.S. (6th to the 13th October N.S.) each year, and revolves round the shrine of the founder, S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ ʿAdī b. Musāfir [ q.v.] and the tombs of other early saints of the sect. The first European to attend and ¶ describe the festival seems to have been Sir Henry Layard in 1846 and 1849; a valuable des…

(“deifiers of ʿAlī”), a vague and popular designation of sects connected with, and issued from, S̲h̲īʿa extremism ( g̲h̲ulāt , [ q.v.]). In Persia and Kurdistān it covers chiefly the Ahl-i Ḥaḳḳ [ q.v.] and Ḳi̊zi̊l-bas̲h̲ [ q.v.], but may occasionally refer to such smaller communities as Ṣarli, S̲h̲abbak [ qq.v] etc. (Ed.)

, a basalt desert, “a district covered with black broken stones, which looks as if it had been burned by fire”. Such ḥarras , which owe their origin to subterranean volcanoes which have repeatedly covered the undulating desert with a bed of lava, are found particularly in the east of Ḥawrān and stretch from there to Medina. Al-Samhūdī, K̲h̲ulāṣat al-wafāʾ bi-ak̲h̲bār dār al-Muṣṭafā , Mecca ed., 1316, 38 gives a detailed description of a great earthquake at Medina which began on 1 D̲j̲umādā II 654/26 June 1256 and lasted several days (see also Wüstenfeld, Geschichte von Madyna …

, conventionally Tindouf , a small town in the southwestern part of modern Algeria, in the governorate ( wilāya ) of Saoura and at the southwestern end of the Hamada of the Dra near where the modern borders of Algeria, Morocco, the former Spanish Sahara and Mauritania meet (lat. 27° 42’ N., long. 80° 10’ W.). It is now on the road connecting western Algeria with Mauritania, with an airstrip, and has recently acquired economic and political importance because of the proximity of iron ore depos…

Pas̲h̲a (1272-1343/1855-1924), late Ottoman statesman and close counselor of Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd II [ q.v.]. Born in Damascus (hence his nickname “ʿArab”) as the son of a wealthy local notable, Hōlō Pas̲h̲ā, he was educated in his hometown and in Beirut and became proficient in Turkish and French. Counted among the reformers, he edited a weekly in Arabic and Turkish, named Dimas̲h̲ḳ . Moving to Istanbul, he eventually joined the ranks of the chamberlains ( ḳurenā ) of ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd and then became a Second Secretary ( ikind̲j̲i kātib ) of the Mābeyn [ q.v.]. He gained great influence ¶ at co…

, the name of various places in the Middle East. These include: 1. A settlement of Diyār Muḍar in al-Ḏj̲azīra, placed by Yāḳūt in the district of al-Ruhā [ q.v.] or Edessa and said to have been laid out by the ʿAbbāsid governor of Syria ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ṣāliḥ. He also quotes a (now lost) history of Mawṣil by the Ḵh̲ālidiyyāni [ q.v.] that the caliph al-Mahdī began the work of fortification there. Bibliography Yāḳūt, Buldān, ed. Beirut, iii, 389-90. 2. A settlement to the north of the old city of Damascus, on the slopes of Mount Ḳāsiyūn [ q.v.]. Yāḳūt describes it as a large village with markets and ¶ a …

(a., pl. wulāt ), from the root w-l-y “to be near something”, hence “to be in charge of something”, comes to mean “person in authority, governor, prefect, administrator manager”, with the maṣdar of wilāya for his office and/or sphere of competence. The word occurs once in the Ḳurʾān, XIII, 12/11, applied to God in the sense of “patron, protector”. See on aspects of the function of the governor in mediaeval Islamic times, amīr . A near-synonym is ḥākim “one who exercises power, jurisdiction, etc.” Under the Ottomans, the wālī , also termed pas̲h̲a [ q.v.], was the governor of a province, eyālet …

(a.), pls. aymān , aymun , literally, “the right hand”, but often used in Arabic with the transferred sense of “oath”. In human life and activity, the right hand often symbolises power and the ability to initiate actions. The Arabic word yamīn has such connotations as fortune and prosperity, whilst the wider term yad “hand in general” covers a vast semantic range: power, help’, strength, sufficiency, ability to act, etc. The right hand can have a cultic significance, as with the bronze hand, probably from the vicinity of Ṣanʿāʾ and now in the British Museum, with a South Arabian ex voto inscri…

, a village in the oasis of Marw in K̲h̲urāsān, according to al-Samʿānī, Ansāb , ed. Ḥaydarābād, ix, 94-5 (who names various ʿulamāʾ from it; cf. also Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iv, 49), two farsak̲h̲s from the chef-lieu Marw al-S̲h̲āhid̲j̲ān [ q.v.]. Its chief fame is that, at the time of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution, in 130/747-8, the Umayyad governor of K̲h̲urāsān, Naṣr b. Sayyār [ q.v.], threatened by the rising under Abū Muslim, appointed his commander Abu ’l-D̲h̲ayyāl over Tūsān; but the latter’s oppressive behaviour prompted Abū Muslim to send a force which…

, a nisba borne by members of the famed Egyptian family of s̲h̲ayk̲h̲ s of the Bakriyya Ṣūfī order [see al-bakrī b. abi ’l-surbūr and bakriyya ]; it related to their claimed descent from the first caliph Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīḳ [ q.v.]. (Ed.)

, a town of Kirmān province, central Persia (lat. 30° 25ʹ N., long. 56° 00ʹ E., altitude 1,572 m/5,156 ft.), situated on the Yazd road 120 km/74 miles to the west of Kirmān city. It is the cheflieu of a s̲h̲ahrastān or district of the same name. Known also as Bahrāmābād, in 1991 it had an estimated population of 87,798 ( Preliminary results of September 1991 census, Statistical Centre of Iran, Population Division). Its chief claim to fame is as the home of the present (1993) head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran “President and Prime Minister” ʿAlī Akbar Hās̲h̲imī Rafsand̲j̲ānī. (Ed.) Bibli…

, name given to the eastern Hazāra inhabiting the mountainous region of central Afg̲h̲ānistān between Kābul and Harāt; in Irān, the region of Mas̲h̲had, Balūčistān (near Quetta), and in the S.S.R. of Turkmenistān, the oasis of Kus̲h̲ka (district of Maki) [see hazāra ]. (Ed.)

(A.), son. The Arab grammarians and lexicographers, who tend to trace all words to three root elements, generally attribute ibn to a root *b.n.w. ¶ and consider that it derives from a hypothetical *banaw un by loss of the 3rd sonant radical. Others state that the root is b.n.y. and that the word ibn comes from the verb banā / yabnī ʿalā “set up [a tent] on”, and, by extension, “marry”. In reality, we have an ancient Semitic biliteral, which is nevertheless triliteralized in the relative adjective banawī and in the abstract noun bunuwwa . The fern, bint , formed with the fem. indicator -t, has a ri…

, a slave singing-girl ( ḳayna [ q.v.]) in the earliest days of Islam. She is mentioned as being in the poetry and music-making circles of Medina in ʿUt̲h̲mān’s caliphate, i.e. the middle years of the 7th century A.D., and as being the teacher ( ustād̲h̲a ) of the celebrated singer ʿAzza al-Maylāʾ [ q.v.]. (Ed.) Bibliography Ag̲h̲ānī 1, xvi, 13=3xvi, 162 H. G. Farmer, A history of Arabian music, London 1929, 46, 54, 147.

, a town and district in southern Kurdistān, since the Ottoman reconquest of ʿIrāḳ from the Ṣafawids in the 11th/17th ¶ century under nominal Ottoman suzerainty, and since the aftermath of the First World War in the kingdom and then republic of ʿIrāḳ. The town lies in lat. 35° 32′ E. and long. 45° 27′ N. at an altitude of 838 m/2,750 feet, and is 90 km/54 miles east of Kirkūk [ q.v.], to which it is connected by road. The historical region of Sulaymāniyya lies between what is now the ʿIrāḳ-Persia frontier, the Diyāla [ q.v.] and its upper affluents the Tand̲j̲aru and Sīrwān, the region of …

(a.), name. In Arabic-Islamic usage the full name of a person is usually made up of the following elements: 1) kunya; 2) ism; 3) nasab ) ; 4) nisba . A certain number of persons are also known by a nickname ( laḳab ) or a pejorative sobriquet ( nabaz ) which, when the name is stated in full, cornes after the nisba. From the end of the 3rd/9th century, the use of an honorific before or after the kunya became more and more frequent with persons of some importance. 1) The kunya [ q.v.], usually a name compound with Abū (“father of”) or Umm (“mother of”): Abu ’l-Faḍl, Umm al-Ḥasan. ¶ 2) The ism , also cailed ʿalam …

(a., pl. awsima ), in modern Arabic usage a decoration, order, medal or badge of honour. The roots w-s-m and w-s̲h̲-m mean basically “to mark, brand [an animal]”, an important feature of nomadic life when ownership of beasts like horses and camels had to be determinable. For this idea of branding, marking, in Arabic desert life, see wasm. In the old Turkish nomadic society, tamg̲h̲a had a similar sense of “tribal mark or emblem”. In the modern Turkish pronunciation damga it is used for government revenue stamps, ministerial seals for validating govern…

(a.), writing. i.—In the Arab world. The Arabic writing used, according to tradition, as early as the lifetime of Muḥammad, for setting down the sacred text of the Ḳurʾān, subsequently underwent a diffusion corresponding to the expansion of the Islamic faith and to the development of the Islamic civilisation in which it came to full fruition. A script of alphabetic and phonological type, belonging to the vast family of Semitic scripts, it shows in this capacity the characteristics of a consonantal script, with vocalisation signs added in the form of …

, purification incumbent upon the Believer after the fulfilment of his natural needs. This practice, which is described in detail, is obligatory (recommended only according to Abū Ḥanīfa) and must be carried out either immediately, or before performing the ṣalāt or any other act which requires a state of ritual purity. (Ed.) Bibliography All the works of fiḳh, ik̲h̲tilāf, etc. deal with this subject in the chapter on ṭahāra similarly G̲h̲azālī, Iḥyāʾ, in the same chapter (iii = 22 of Bousquet’s analysis).

, in northern Persia, the name for the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, comprising both the narrow coastal plain region and the steeply-rising mountainous interior of the Elburz chain. It was bounded in mediaeval Islamic times by Gīlān and Daylam on the west and by Gurgān on the east. The name Ṭabaristān enshrines a memory of the ancient people of the Τάπυροι, but received a popular etymology as “land of the axe ( ṭabar )” because woodcutting was an activity in this heavily-wooded region. Ṭabaristān ( nisba , al-Ṭabarī) was the designation for the region up …