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, town and port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, 25 km. to the north-east of Casablanca, in the lands of the Zanāta tribe. The origin of the name is unknown; the etymology given by Graberg de Hemsö and by Godard ( fayḍ Allāh = “bounty of God”) is obviously fanciful. The name is perhaps to be compared with that of a section of the neighbouring Ziyāyda tribe, the Faḍḍāla. The toponym appears as early as al-Idrīsī and the Genoese and Venetian portulans. It appears that Christian merchants visited the anchorage in the …

the old name of Casablanca (Ar. al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ, dial.: Ḍār l-Bēḍa), often written as Anafe in the Portuguese chronicles. The word, according to E. Laoust ( REI, 1939) is a variant of the Berber afa «summit, hillock», which induces one to place the early site on the hill now occupied by the residential quarter called «upper Anfa». Marmol attributes the foundation to the Carthaginians, Leo to the Romans, but neither theory is supported by any text or archaeological remains. Al-Zayyānī ascribes it to the Zānāta amīrs , and places it at the end of the 1st/7th …

, the Arab name for Casablanca, the principal city in Morocco. In Arab dialect Dār l-Bēḍa, formerly Anfā [ q.v.]. After the Portuguese had destroyed Anfā in the 15th century, the town remained in ruins, sheltering but a few Bedouins and being occasionally used by ships as a watering-place. The Portuguese named the locality Casabranca, after a white house, overlooking the ruins, which served as a landmark for their ships. The Spanish transformed the name into Casablanca, the present European name of the city. The Arab name is its literal translation. The ʿAlawid Sulṭān Sīdī Muḥammad b.…

, municipality, the term used in Turkish ( belediye ), Arabic, and other Islamic languages, to denote modern municipal institutions of European type, as against earlier Islamic forms of urban organisation [see madīna ]. The term, like so many modern Islamic neologisms and the innovations they express, first appeared in Turkey, where Western-style municipal institutions and services were introduced as part of the general reform programme of the Tanẓīmāt [ q.v.]. (1) turkey. The first approaches towards modern municipal administration seems to have been made by Sultan …