, local ruler in northern Palestine in the 18th century ( ca. 1690-1775). His father and grandfather had already been multazim s of Tiberias, and as a young man, Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar struck an alliance with the al-Ṣaḳr tribe of eastern Galilee and made Tiberias his first power base. The 1730s were filled with efforts to expand his realm and consolidate his rule. In 1738 he conquered the fortress of D̲j̲iddīn, which controlled the region of Tars̲h̲īḥa, Wabar and Abū Sinān, and Ṣafad surrendered to him…

, Arab scholar and littérateur. He was born ca. 1775 (thus acc. to S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ū, in Mas̲h̲riḳ , viii [1905], 29) in Acre, Palestine, into a Melkite family, and died in 1816 in Paris. His grandfather was Ibrāhīm al-Ṣabbāg̲h̲, the personal physician and steward of Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar, ruler of ʿAkkā (so S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ū, op. cit., 27), and also his secretary and minister (so al-K̲h̲ūrī Ḳusṭanṭīn al-Bās̲h̲ā al-Muk̲h̲alliṣī in his introduction to M. al-Ṣabbāg̲h̲, Taʾrīk̲h̲ al-S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar al-Zaydānī , 5). Mīk̲h̲āʾīl spent his early years in Damascus, from where he and his f…

, modern Haifa, a port at the foot of Mount Carmel. The name does not occur in the Bible, but appears frequently in the Talmud and in later Jewish sources, and is mentioned by Eusebius as ʿΕφα. In the early Muslim centuries Haifa was overshadowed by ʿAkkā [ q.v.], and is first described by Nāṣir-i K̲h̲usraw, who was there in 438/1046. He speaks of the palm-groves and numerous trees of this village ( dih ), and mentions the nearby sands of the kind used by Persian goldsmiths and called by them Makkī sand. He also found shipwrights who, he said, made the large, sea-going ships called Ḏj̲ūdī ( Safar-nāma…

, Syria, etymologically, “the left-hand region”, because in ancient Arab usage the speaker in western or central Arabia was considered to face the rising sun and to have Syria on his left and the Arabian peninsula, with Yaman (“the rig̲h̲thand region”), on his right (cf. al-Masʿūdī, Murūd̲j̲ ., iii, 140-1 = § 992; al-Muḳaddasī, partial French tr. A. Miquel, La meilleure répartition pour la connaissance des provinces , Damascus 1963, 155-6, both with other, fanciful explanations). In early Islamic usage, the term bilād al-S̲h̲ām covered what in early 20th-…