Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Māshiṭa (d. after 311/923) was an ʿAbbāsid bureaucrat and author. Nothing is known of his origins other than his nickname (“son of the hairdresser”) which, however, seems to have been an insult rather than a reference to his family (Ibn al-Nadīm). He had a long career as an accountant in charge of wages (this seems the most probable meaning of al-Tanūkhī’s kāna yataqalladu… al-ʿamālāt, although the reference does not seem to be a separate sub-bureau in the administrative manuals). Already at an advanced age, he was appointed head of the state treasury (dīw…

Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl b. Shuʿayb Ibn Mītham was a Shīʿī theologian who flourished in the second-third/eighth-ninth centuries. A native of Kufa who settled in Basra, he was one of the most prominent dialecticians ( mutakallimūn) of the Shīʿī circle led by Hishām b. al-Ḥakam (d. c.199/814). He seems to have belonged to the second generation of Shīʿī thinkers, those who followed dialectical reasoning (kalām), even though, according to Ibn al-Nadīm (d. c.380/990), he would have been the very first thinker to introduce the kalām method into the debates revolving around the issu…

Mardāvīj b. Ziyār (lit., he who hangs people, Ibn al-Wardī, 1:267; Justi, 194; Minorsky, 14; d. 323/935–6, r. 319–23/931–5) and his older brother Vushmgīr (lit., purchaser of quails, Minorsky, 14; called Washmgīr in Justi, 359; r. 323–56/935–67) were founders of the Ziyārid dynasty (Bosworth, New Islamic dynasties, 166–7), which ruled Ṭabaristān and Jurjān from 319/931 to about 483/10190. He belonged to a noble tribe (al-Ṣābī, 14; al-Bīrūnī, 39; Kaykāvus, 2–3; al-Bayhaqī, 359) from the Jīl region on the southwestern coast of the Caspian Sea…

Fadak was an agricultural village in the northern Ḥijāz somewhere near Khaybar, which is about one hundred fifty kilometres from Medina. Fadak was the centre of a long-running dispute between the reigning caliphs and the family of the prophet Muḥammad, which continued through the first three Islamic centuries. After this period, Fadak recedes from view and by the ninth/fifteenth century it was possible for two experts on Ḥijāzī geography—al-Fīrūzābādī (d. 817/1415) and al-Samhūdī (d. 911/1506)—t…

Japheth is not mentioned in the Qurʾān. The Qurʾān mentions the story of Noah in several passages but offers little regarding his family. There is reference to a wicked wife (Q 66:10) and an impious son (Q 11:40–6), the latter usually identified in later traditions as Canaan or Yām. Japheth is named amongst the three sons of Noah (Shem, Japheth, and Ham) only in a few later reports and traditions relating mainly to the genealogies of peoples after the Flood. Few details about Japheth appear in Islamic literature. Japheth was one of seven or eight saved in the Ark (al-Ṭarafī…

Āmū Daryā is the modern name for the major Central Asian river draining most of the watershed of the northern Hindu Kush, western Pamir, and southern Buttam mountains into the basin of the Aral Sea (now largely dried up by the diversion of the water for agriculture and other uses). The names given by geographers to the many tributaries that form the Āmū Daryā differ greatly, and views have changed over which is the main course and source of the river ( daryā is a Persian word for a major river). The two most important tributaries are the Wakhsh (whence Oxus, the common Englis…

The Caspian Sea, a landlocked body of salt water in Central Eurasia, is Earth’s largest lake. 1. Names and early history Ancient authors named the sea for the Caspian peoples that had inhabited the southwest coast but had disappeared by the time of Strabo (d. after 23 C.E.; Strabo, Geography, 9.4.5; Strabo, Geografiia, 305). Muslim geographers named the sea for its coastal regions, cities, or nations (Le Strange, 22). The most common name in mediaeval Arabic literature was the Khazar Sea. After the decisive defeat of the Sāsānid army by Arab Musl…

Asfār b. Shīrawayh (Shīrūya; d. c.319/931) was a soldier of fortune from the Daylam region (for his lineage, see Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, 241, and Madelung, Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābī, 25, n. 52, but see also al-Masʿūdī, 5:26, and Bosworth, Asfār b. Šīrūya, EIr). Like other frontiersmen of the region, he played an ambitious role during the turbulent events following the death of the Zaydī Imām al-Nāṣir lil-Ḥaqq al-Uṭrūsh in Ṭabaristān in 304/917. Many factors and varied interests, local and regional, affected the unsettled social and political situation in Daylam. These included…

Iram is an ancient Arabian name most commonly associated in modern writing with a lost city in southeastern Arabia, the capital of the pre-Islamic people of ʿĀd, whom God destroyed for their disbelief (Cobb, 2:559; Clapp). The meaning of “Iram” has, however, undergone a complex evolution of varied and debated interpretations in both Muslim and European narratives. Pre-Islamic Nabatean epigraphy uses ʾrm as a toponym in northwestern Arabia (Savignac, 591; Macdonald, 3:76, n. 171; Hoyland, 39–40), near the modern border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The …

The farsakh (pl. farāsikh), or parasang, was a measure of distance based on a notion of time. Originating in Iran (or Parthia, to be more precise) this unit passed first into the Armenian and Syriac languages (as hrasakh and prasakhā, respectively) before being first documented in Arabic in the first/seventh century. The Persians used the term “farsakh” alongside the more Iranian form “farsang.” From the ʿAbbāsid period onwards, the use of farsakh as a unit of length spread among Muslims throughout the Middle East in the mediaeval period. Indeed, the milliary dista…

Abū l-ʿAbbās al-Īrānshahrī was a third/ninth-century Persian scholar who, as his name indicates, hailed from the city of Īrānshahr (also known as Nīshāpūr). Sometimes described as the first philosopher of Islam, he appears to have practiced a variety of disciplines, ranging from natural philosophy and metaphysics to history and astronomy. It is in connection with the latter discipline that the great fifth/eleventh-century philosopher and scientist al-Bīrūnī (d. c.440/1048) refers to him in al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī (“The Masʿūdic canon”) ( maqāla 6.632). However, al-Īrānshahrī …

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…

Mukhtār b. ʿAwf al-Azdī (d. 130/748), of the Banū Salama, known as Abū Ḥamza, was a Basran native (Ibn Khayyāṭ, 251; al-Iṣfahānī, 23:227), an ascetic (al-Jāḥiẓ, 2:79), and an Ibāḍī military leader later remembered as one of the shurāt (martyr soldiers, lit., exchangers, those who exchanged their lives for God’s pleasure) (al-Darjīnī, 2:258, 262; Ibn Khayyāṭ, 250). He was said to have agitated against the Umayyad caliph Marwān II (Marwān b. Muḥammad, r. 127–32/744–50) for several years in Mecca before he met ʿAbdallāh b. Yaḥyā (Ṭālib…

Kizimkazi-Dimbani is at the southern end of Unguja island in the Zanzibar archipelago. It has a mosque with the earliest known floriated Kufic inscription, dated to 500/1107. It is near the older site of Unguja Ukuu, which was settled from about 500 C.E. to 338/950 (Juma) and contains much Sāsānid and Islamic pottery. Kizimkazi was investigated by Neville Chittick, Mark Horton and Catherine Clark, and Else Kleppe; they established an archaeological sequence that is consistent with the date of th…

Abū ʿAbdallāh or Abū Bakr Muḥammad Ibn Isḥāq (d. c.151/768) ṣāḥib al-sīra/ṣāḥib al-maghāzī (the compiler of the monograph on the Prophet’s biography/battles) compiled the most widespread mediaeval biography of the prophet Muḥammad, known to us mainly through an abridged and censored version produced by Ibn Hishām (d. 218/833 or 213/828). Ibn Isḥāq was a mawlā, that is, a descendant of a manumitted slave. His grandfather Yasār was among a group of Jewish boys taken captive in the village of Nuqayra, near ʿAyn al-Tamr (modern Shithātha, some 50 kilom…

Nawbakht was an astrologer of Khurāsānian origin (d. c.160/777, as a centenarian) at the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr (r.136–58/754–75) after having accurately foretold his accession to the caliphate. In Persian, nawbakht literally means “new fortune.” Originally from a Zoroastrian family, he converted to Islam at the caliph’s urging and adopted the name ʿAbdallāh. His wife and his son Abū Sahl, who would later succeed him as court astrologer, converted with him. Nawbakht was commissioned by the caliph al-Manṣūr to lead the team of mathematicians and astron…

Al-Mukhtār b. Abī ʿUbayd b. Masʿūd al-Thaqafī al-Kūfī (d. 67/687) was the leader of a pro-ʿAlid rebellion through which he briefly ruled Kufa, between 66/685 and 67/687. Al-Mukhtār is also strongly associated with the Shīʿī religious movement known as the Kaysāniyya (for a narrative history of the movement, see Hawting; for the doctrines and history of the Kaysāniyya, see Capezzone). 1. Al-Mukhtār’s life Al-Mukhtār was born in 1/622 (al-Ṭabarī, 2:1) in Ṭāʾif. He later moved to Medina with his father during the caliphate of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 12–23/634–…

Khaybar is a settlement in the Ḥijāz, approximately 150 kilometres north of Medina. According to al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956)—followed by Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī (d. 487/1094) and Yāqūt (d. 626/1229)—the distance from Medina equated to eight postal stations (al-Masʿūdī, 256; al-Bakrī, 2:521; Yāqūt, 2:503). Islamic-era sources place it within the administrative dependencies (aʿrāḍ) of Medina (Ibn Khurradādhbih, 129, 248; Ibn Rusta, 177; al-Muqaddasī, 53). Al-Hamdānī (writing in the early fourth/tenth century) adds, perhaps somewhat tentatively, that it w…

Ḥājib (pl. ḥujjāb) is a courtly and military title that was in use in many Islamicate societies from the first/seventh to the fourteenth/twentieth century. Although routinely translated as “chamberlain,” the title was applied at different times to doorkeepers, military officers, governors, prime ministers, and petty kings. When ḥājibs were many and served different institutions, their chiefs were distinguished by inflated titles: ḥājib al-ḥujjāb, al-ḥājib al-kabīr, ḥājib-i buzurg, ulugh ḥājib, amīr ḥājib, and so on. Sometimes ḥājibs had compound titles to reflect speci…

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…