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, ‘political party’. The use of the word ḥizb in the sense of a political party is a recent one, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century or thereabouts, but this modern usage was in a way a natural and legitimate extension of the traditional and classical one (see preceding article). This traditional sense is the one found in the nineteenth-century dictionaries. Thus Kazimirski’s Dictionnaire (1860) defined ḥizb as a ‘troupe d’hommes’; Lane’s Lexicon (1863 et seq.) as a ‘party or company of men, assembling themselves on account of an event that has befallen them’; Bustānī’s Muḥīṭ…

, in modern Arabic constitution. A word of Persian origin, it seems originally to have meant a person exercising authority, whether religious or political, and was later specialized to designate members of the Zoroastrian priesthood. It occurs in Kalīla wa-Dimna in the sense of “counsellor”, and recurs with the same sense, at a much later date, in the phrase Dustūr-i mükerrem , one of the honorific titles of the Grand Vizier in the Ottoman Empire. More commonly, dustūr was used in the sense of “rule” or “regulation”, and in particular the code of ru…