ʿAmr b. Hind was a Lakhmid king (r. 554–70 C.E.), son of the more famous al-Mundhir (r. 527–54 C.E.) and the Kindī princess Hind, to whom the matronymic by which he is known refers. Before his accession as king in 554 C.E., he had been designated by his father to watch over the large Arab confederation of Maʿadd and in that capacity was defeated by Abraha, the Ethiopian ruler of southern Arabia, at the battle of Ḥulubān/Ḥalibān in about 550 C.E. As the Lakhmid client-king of Sāsānid Persia (554–69 C.E.), his most important funct…

ʿAmr b. Kulthūm was a sixth-century poet, author of one of the Muʿallaqāt, and chief of the Jusham branch of Taghlib. For the Taghlib of Islamic times ʿAmr was a very important figure, both as a symbol of their resistance to the rulers of al-Ḥīra and as the celebrator of their deeds against Bakr, their inveterate tribal enemies. Tradition makes him, through his mother Laylā, the grandson of al-Muhalhil, one of the originators of the War of al-Basūs. The main story (khabar) that survives about him is a detailed account of how he slew ʿAmr b. Hind, the tyrannical ruler of al-Ḥ…

Abū Shurayḥ al-Tamīmī Aws b. Ḥajar (sixth century C.E.) was a pre-Islamic Arab poet. Since Aws was called the faḥl Muḍar and regarded as the best poet of the Banū Tamīm before the rise of al-Nābigha and Zuhayr, it is astonishing that almost no concrete facts about his life have come down to us. Nevertheless we may conclude from his relations to other poets and to some of the Lakhmid kings, especially ʿAmr b. Hind, that he was born between about 520 and 535 C.E. and that he died before the Hijra (see GAS 2:171, following Gustave von Grunebaum and Werner Caskel). Aws shares the fate of many other early jā…

Al-Ḥārith b. Ḥilliza (d. c.575 C.E.) was a pre-Islamic poet famed especially for his muʿallaqa, one of the seven (or possibly ten) pre-Islamic poems (the muʿallaqāt), singled out for particular praise by later generations. According to some traditions, the poems were written in letters of gold on cloth and hung on the walls of the holy Kaʿba in Mecca. The poet was a member of the Yashkur (one of the branches of the important Bakr b. Wāʾil tribe). He may have lived in Iraq and died when he was over one hundred years old. According to his poetry, al-Ḥārith was an abraṣ (lit., a leper) (ʿAṭiyya 128). Se…

Ḥumayd b. Thawr al-Hilālī was an Arab poet of the first/seventh century. Information about his person is scarce and often contradictory. In his genealogy, for instance, his grandfather’s name is ʿAbdallāh according to Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī and Ibn ʿAsākir, but Ḥazn b. ʿAmr according to Ibn al-Kalbī. Al-Jumaḥī says that ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Manāf, not ʿĀmir b. Abī Rabīʿa b. Nahīk as Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī and Ibn ʿAsākir stated, was his great-grandfather. His kunya (teknonym) is subject to similar confusion: Ibn ʿAsākir and Yāqūt transmit Abū l-Muthannā; less frequent is A…

Abū ʿAmra ʿAbdallāh b. al-ʿAjlān (in some sources called ʿAjlān, Ibn al-ʿAjlān or al-ʿAjlānī) b. ʿAbd al-Aḥabb b. ʿĀmir b. Kaʿb b. Ṣubāḥ b. Nahd was a pre-Islamic poet who lived in the sixth century C.E. He was a sayyid (chief) of the Banū Nahd, like his father, who was also one of the wealthiest members of the tribe. ʿAbdallāh was married to Hind, a woman of the same tribe, and lived with her for more than seven years without having children. His father asked ʿAbdallāh to repudiate Hind because of their childlessness, but he refused…

Al-Munakhkhal al-Yashkurī (fl. late sixth century C.E.)—sometimes rendered simply as Munakhkhal—was a pre-Islamic love poet. He lived during the reign of al-Nuʿmān III, king of al-Ḥīra in south central Iraq (r. c.580–602 C.E.), but little is known of him and little of his poetry survives. He belonged to the Yashkur, a branch of the great Bakr b. Wāʾil tribe, which inhabited al-Yamāma in the east central Arabian peninsula (Kaḥḥāla, 3: 1265). There is, however, no consensus about the poet’s full na…

Mustamlī is the active participle of the Arabic Form X verb istamlā, meaning “to ask someone for dictation,” with a secondary terminological signification “to employ someone as a mustamlī” (istamlāhu) or “to serve as a mustamlī” ( istamlā li- or ʿinda). Muslim traditionists ( muḥaddithūn, sing. muḥaddith) used the verb istamlā and its derivatives in their basic lexical meaning to refer to the students’ asking the shaykh to dictate specific traditions. In this manner, Sufyān al-Thawrī (active in Kufa; d. 161/778) would ask (yasʾalu wa-yastamlī) Ḥammād b. Zayd (Basra; 179/795) to…

Backgammon, or trictrac, a board game for two persons, played with dice, of the race-game type, was known in the central Islamic lands as nard, a Persian word of uncertain origin, said to be a shortening of nardashīr, in turn derived from Ardashīr (Artaxerxes, r. 224–41 C.E.), founder of the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651 C.E.), who in some legends is said to have invented the game (in the version of the poet Firdawsī (d. 411/1020), Shāhnāma, trans. Davis, 701–4, the game called nard is not a race game but a battle game, not unlike the Roman latrunculi) [Illustration 1]. In these stories nard is ver…

The Ghaznavids were a dynasty that was established in the eastern part of present-day Afghanistan in the second half of the fourth/tenth century. It is generally described as the dynasty that opened the way for Muslim conquests of Hindustan. 1. Dynastic history, part i The beginnings of the Ghaznavids lay in the armed force that crossed the Hindu Kush from the north, led by Alptegin, a former Sāmānid Turkish general of military slave origin. The army fought the king of Bāmiyān and the son of the Kabul Shāh (Hindū Shāh) on the way and fina…

Chess was a board game played in the Middle East already before the coming of Islam. Originating in India, the game reached the Arab world via Persia and arrived in Europe via the Arabs, mostly through interactions in Spain. The Arabic word for “chess” is shaṭranj or shiṭranj, with the latter said to be better according to Arabic lexicographers wishing to make the word conform to standard Arabic morphology. In Middle Persian the term is chatrang and in Sanskrit it is caturaṅga (with four limbs), referring to the four army divisions represented in the game. Al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/8…

Al-Muʾayyad fī l-Dīn Abū Naṣr Hibatallāh b. Abī ʿImrān Mūsā b. Dāʾūd al-Shīrāzī (d. 470/1078), was chief dāʿī (agent of the religious, educational, and political mission, the daʿwa) under the Fāṭimid imām-caliph al-Mustanṣir (r. 427–87/1036–94), and he held the rank directly below the imām in the spiritual hierarchy. He was a renowned scholar and poet—his magnum opus is al-Majālis al-Muʾayyadiyya, a compendium of eight hundred lectures on symbolic interpretation (taʾwīl) of the Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and sharīʿa. 1. Life The foremost sources for al-Muʾayyad’s life are two in his…

The Ghūrids (or Shansabānīs) were a dynasty of independent Muslim rulers who conquered much of eastern Iran and northern India from the mid-sixth/twelfth century to the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century. Arising from the mountains of present-day central Afghanistan, they established an immense empire that reshaped the political and cultural boundaries of the eastern Islamic lands and laid the foundations of the Delhi Sultanate. The Ghūrid territories west of the Indus were conquered by the Khvārazmshāhs shortly before the Mongol irruption. 1. Early Shansabānī history T…