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, Ṣafī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAlī , ʿIrāḳī historian. A descendant of al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī through Ibrāhīm al-Ṭabāṭabā, he was born, it seems, shortly after the conquest of Bag̲h̲dād by the Mongols, which he does not mention as having witnessed personally. His father, Tād̲j̲ al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ramaḍān, chief naḳīb of the ʿAlids, had gained great wealth and influence, but in a game of political intrigue against the brothers ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn and S̲h̲ams al-Dīn al-D̲j̲uwaynī [ qq.v.], he lost his life and property (Ibn ʿInaba, ʿUmdat al-ṭālib , al-Nad̲j̲af 1381/1961, 180 f.). His son too, was a naḳ…

(also s̲h̲ahdānaḳ , s̲h̲āhdānad̲j̲ s̲h̲ādānaḳ , s̲h̲arānaḳ ) hempseed. In Greek pharmacology and throughout its Arabic counterpart, it was known as a rather minor simple, useful for drying out fluid in the ear by dripping its oil into it, harmful in that it caused headache and sexual dysfunction when eaten in large quantities, and the like. The word was commonly accepted as the Persian equivalent of Greek cannabis , Ar. ḳinnab , and hence served as another ¶ term for ḥas̲h̲īs̲h̲ [ q.v.]; this may explain why so many different forms were in use. (F. Rosenthal) Bibliography A. Dietrich, Dioscur…

, Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Asʿad , Arab genealogist and historian, b. 525/1131, d. 588/1192. The Ḏj̲awwānī family claimed ʿAlid descent through a son of ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. This pedigree was well established at least as early as the first half of the 4th/10th century when Abu ’l-Farad̲j̲ al-Iṣfahānī ( Maḳātil al-Ṭālibiyyīn , Cairo 1368/1949, 193, 435, 438) reported historical information received by him personally from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-D̲j̲awwānī, himself a genealogist and the eighth line…

, or Fūt̲h̲āg̲h̲ūras (rarely Būt̲h̲āg̲h̲ūras or other individual transliterations), Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher of the sixth century B.C., as celebrated and as elusive a figure in Islam as in the West. The distinction between the man and the school, or schools, bearing his name was occasionally sensed but, of course, not really understood, and no true distinction was made between the two. The partly historical and mostly legendary circumstances of his life were known in considerable detail through a lengthy summary of his biography from Porphyry’s Philosophos Historia …

, Taʿlīḳa (a., pls. taʿlīḳāt , taʿālīḳ ) in scholarly activity refers to the “appending upon ( ʿala )” a text or the “deriving from ( ʿan )” an author and then to the resulting notes, glosses, comments, excerpts and appendices. Similar in a way to ḥās̲h̲iya [ q.v.], it is, however, much less firmly anchored in manuscripts than ḥās̲h̲iya was originally. ¶ In later centuries, it came to be used quite frequently in titles of essays. Earlier, its supposed use as a title was more descriptive than formal and was often the choice of convenience by someone other than the author. Among titles listed in the Fi…

refers to the ancient Greeks, reflecting the name “Ionians”. Yūnānī means Greek (noun and adjective) and al-yūnāniyya or, less commonly, al-yūnānī (with or without lug̲h̲a or lisān ), the ancient Greek language. The vocalisation yūnānī , instead of yawnānī favoured by some (cf. al-Tawḥīdī, Baṣāʾir , ed. W. al-Ḳādī, Beirut 1408/1988, iii, 11), is stated to be the generally accepted form by al-Samʿānī, Ansāb , ed. Ḥaydarābād, xiii, 536, and may have been favoured by the Arabic word formation fuʿlān . The ancient Near Eastern designation of the “Greeks” a…

, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Isḥāḳ b. al-ʿAbbās , 3rd/9th-century historian of Mecca. No information on him was available to later Muslim scholars, or is to us, except what can be learned from his History of Mecca , of which the second half is preserved in a single manuscript in Leiden (cod. or. 463). A small portion of the work has been edited by F. Wüstenfeld, Die Chroniken der Stadt Mekka , Leipzig 1857-61, ii, 3-51. Al-Fākihī was alive and, it seems, quite young during the judgeship of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Yazīd b. Muḥammad b. Hanzala b. Muḥam…

b. Yūsuf al-Tud̲j̲ībī , historian of Egypt, was born on yawm al-naḥr (10 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḥid̲j̲d̲j̲a) 283/18 January 897 and died on Tuesday, 3 Ramaḍān 350/Wednesday, 16 October 961. He heard al-Nasāʾī, the author of the Sunan , when the latter lectured in Egypt, and appears to have lectured on ḥadīt̲h̲ himself. Among his teachers and historical informants, Ibn Ḳudayd (d. 312/924-5) seems to have been the most important one. His principal transmitters (cf. his Judges ) was Ibn al-Naḥḥās (323-416/935-1025). This is about all that is known of his life. The…

, Abū Saʿīd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Ṣadafī (b. 281/894, d. Monday 26 D̲j̲umādā II 347/14 September 958, which, however, was a Tuesday), a grandson of the famous early Egyptian supporter of al-S̲h̲āfiʿī, Yūnus b. ʿAbd al-Aʿlā, and the father of the astronomer (below). He wrote on Egyptian scholars and, in a separate work, on the foreigners who came to visit or settle in Egypt. Both works were much used sources of information for later authors, but they seem not to have been pres…

, the game of chess. The derivation of the word from Sanskrit catur añga “having four ranks” (Nyberg, 54a) is generally accepted. Arab philologists often argued in favour of a vocalisation s̲h̲iṭrand̲j̲ and offered more or less ill-advised attempts at etymology (Lane 1551c, and see R. Ermers, in JAOS, cxiv [1994], 294b). While the form of the word supports the game’s Indian provenience as a war game, chess reached the Near East via Persia, as shown by the many Persian terms employed in it. The Muslim Near East, in turn, transmitted it to Euro…

, muḥyī al-dīn muḥammad b. sulaymān al-ḥanafī , 9th-15th century scholar and prolific writer on many subjects. Born in, or rather, after, 788/1386-87 in Ṣarūk̲h̲ān [ q.v.] in a place called Kökd̲j̲ekī, apparently situated near Bergama as indicated by the additional nisba al-Barg̲h̲amī, he came to Egypt after 830/1427 and was soon welcomed into the leading scholarly circles there. Čaḳmaḳ appointed him a professor in the Zāwiyat al-As̲h̲raf S̲h̲aʿbān and later promoted him to the academic deanship ( mas̲h̲yak̲h̲at al-tadrīs ) of S̲h̲aʿbān’s Turba. The id…

, Aḥmad b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm , Ṭūlūnid historian. His father Yūsuf was a fosterbrother of the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim and an administrative assistant to Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī. As such, Yūsuf moved in the centre of intellectual life in Bag̲h̲dād and Sāmarrā and counted among his acquaintances many littérateurs and physicians. After the death of Ibn al-Mahdī in 224/839 (and, presumably, in consequence of it), he left Sāmarrā for Damascus and, it seems, moved from there to Egypt where he th…

is the most common Islamic term for gambling, which is strictly forbidden according to Muslim law. The prohibition goes back to the references to maysir [ q.v.] in Ḳurʾān, II, 219/216, and V, 90 f ./92 f. Maysir was expressly equated with ḳimār in general, supposedly already by ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar (cf. al-Buk̲h̲ārī, al-Adab al-mufrad , Cairo 1375, 325). Voices querying this assumption, and the assumption that the Ḳurʾān had the legal classification of “forbidden” in mind, were rarely raised, and then only for the sake of argumen…

, ʿAbd Allāh b. Lahīʿa b. ʿUḳba , Egyptian traditionist and judge ( b. ca . 96/688-69, d. Sunday, 15 Rabīʿ I 174/1 August 790, or 23 D̲j̲umādā II 174/6 November 790). The few known facts about his life are that he was appointed judge in 155/772 with a monthly salary of thirty dīnārs , the appointment being the first direct appointment of a chief judge of Egypt by a caliph instead of the provincial governor; that he held the judgeship for over nine years; and that his “books”—that is, primarily, his scholarly notebooks and mate…

, ʿalam al-dīn al-ḳāsim b. muḥammad b. yūsuf , also called Ibn al-Birzālī, Syrian historian and ḥadīt̲h̲ scholar. He was born in Damascus in D̲j̲umada I or II, 665/February-April, 1267. A case could be made for the earlier date, sometimes mentioned, of 663/1265, but al-Birzālī himself evidently maintained that he was born in 665. His ancestors belonged to the Birzāl [ q.v.] Berbers. His great-grandfather, Zaki al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Yūsuf (b. ca. 577/1181-82, d. in Ḥamā in 636/1239), ¶ had settled in Syria at the beginning of the 7th/13th century. Zakī nl-Dīn’s additional nisba …

, abū ’l-ḥasan aḥmad b. ʿabd allāh b. muḥammad , appears to be the most acceptable form of the name of the alleged author, or final rāwī , of historical novels dealing with the early years of Islam, who also is credited with a mawlid and a fictional life of Muḥammad. The ¶ earliest biography devoted to him is to be found in al-D̲h̲ahabī, Mīzān , Cairo 1325, i, 53. Al-D̲h̲ahabī indignantly describes al-Bakrī as a liar and inventor of untrue stories, whose books were available at the booksellers (and, presumably, enjoyed good sales). Consi…

, Nūr al-Dīn Ibn Rustum , Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, 7th/13th century ¶ Syrian poet. Born in 619/1222 in Isʿird or Siʿird [ q.v.] in Southeastern Anatolia, which he sentimentally remembers in his Dīwān , he lived in Bag̲h̲dād and visited Egypt, but most of his adult life was, it seems, spent in Damascus (and al-Ṣāliḥiyya). There the ḳaḍī Ṣadr al-Dīn Ibn Sanī al-Dawla (590-658/1194-1260), for whom al-Isʿirdī expressed biting contempt, appointed him one of the official witnesses (attorneys) doing busi…

, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan , 10th/16th century author of a once popular history of Muḥammad, entitled Taʾrīk̲h̲ al-k̲h̲amīs fī aḥwāl nafs nafīs and preserved in numerous MSS and printed twice (Cairo 1283, 1302). The work is furnished in addition with a brief sketch of subsequent Muslim history. The brief enumeration of Ottoman rulers at the end stops in some MSS with Süleymān Ḳānūnī but usually ends with Murād III (982/1574). The author is also credited with a detailed description of the sa…

Abu ’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. al-Ṭayyib b. Marwān, the most prominent disciple of al-Kindī and, like his master, a dedicated advocate of Greek learning at the unsure early stage of its Muslim integration, but with a more pronounced inclination toward adab . He was born around 220/835 and died early in 286/899. A fact attested for his obscure early life is his participation as the delegate of al-Kindī in a multireligious philosophical-theological debate about Christianity and the Trinity (see Moosa and Holmberg). He began his career as an educ…

, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn K̲h̲alīl b. Aybak , Abu ’l-Ṣafāʾ al-Albakī (696-764/1297-1363), philologist, literary critic and littérateur, biographer, and all-round humanist. Ṣafad was his family’s home, and he was born there. His father, al-Amīr ʿIzz al-Dīn Aybak (b. ʿAbd Allāh!) was of Turkic origin; the nisba al-Albakī, after some mamlūk amīr named Albakī, seems to have belonged to him. From the apparent absence of any mention of him by his son, we may conclude that al-Ṣafadī considered him undistinguished. Relations with his father…