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(a.), a type of mediaeval Arabic warship used in the Mediterranean. The s̲h̲īnī is mentioned briefly in safīna . 1 (b) as a type of galley, but its importance in naval history of the time merits separate notice.…

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(a.) “navigation, seamanship; seafaring”. Like its English and French counterparts, navigation , the Arabic term has both a narrower and a broader connotation. The former refers to the mariner’s art of determining the ship’s position, charting her course and assuring that her progress and ultimate arrival is performed efficiently and safely; the latter, to seafaring in general. The term is attested in its faʿʿāl form, mallāḥ , at least since the ʿAbbāsid period (Lane, vii, 2733); it appears to go back to Akkadian and ultimately Sumerian ( Chicago Akkadian dictionary, Letter M …

, Egypt A. The eponym of Egypt B. The early Islamic settlements developing out of the armed camps and the metropolises of the conquered provinces C. The land of Egypt: the name in early Islamic times …

, the mediaeval Islamic form for the land of Nubia, lying to the south of Egypt, and its peoples. 1. Definition The names Nubia, Nubian, Nūba are commonly used without scientific precision and it is only in the linguistic sense that they have an unambiguous meaning. The frontier separating Nubia from Egypt proper is well defined as the first cataract of the Nile in the neighbourhood of Aswān, and the area where Nubian is spoken nowadays ends in the vicinity of the 18th parallel, but the southern limit of Nubia is so…

or simply Ṭarābulus, with the local variants of Itrābulus, Iṭrābulus al-G̲h̲arb and Ṭrablus, the name for the city of Tripoli, of Africa or of Barbary, in Libya, a designation which is also extended to Tripolitania, a region of North Africa bordering the Mediterranean which, with Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, constitutes the State of Libya [see …

b. ʿAbd al-Ḳays al-Ḳurās̲h̲ī al-Fihrī (d. 63/683), one of the most prominent Arab commanders of the Islamic conquests period, above all in North Africa, where he was responsible for the foundation of al-Ḳayrawān [ q.v.]. He was born towards the end of the Prophet’s life, hence was accounted a Companion, and was through his mother a nephew of ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ [ q.v.], the conqueror of Egypt, who shortly before his death in 43/663 was to give him command over the lands to the west of Egypt. It seems that ʿUḳba had already ¶ played a role in ʿAmr’s first raid towards North Africa in 21/642, …