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, the Acco (ʿAkkō) of the Old Testament, the Ptolemais of the Greeks, the Acre of the French, town on the Palestinian seaboard. ʿAkkā was captured by the Arabs under the command of S̲h̲uraḥbīl b. Ḥasana. As the town had suffered in the wars with the Byzantines, Muʿāwiya rebuilt it, and constructed there naval yards which the Caliph His̲h̲ām later transferred to Tyre. Ibn Ṭūlūn constructed great stone embankments round the port; al-Maḳdisī, whose grandfather executed the work, gives an interestin…

an isolated mountain (known locally as a ḥaḍba ) located in Nad̲j̲d at about 24° 48′ N, 43° 54′ E, some 60 km. north-west of al-Dawādimī, 25 km. south and east of Nafī, and 15 km. west of Wādī al-Ris̲h̲āʾ. The mountain, which consists of reddish stone, rises abruptly from the surrounding gravel plains. About seven km. in length and three km. wide, D̲j̲abala runs from south-west to northeast with three main wādīs descending from its slopes…

(a.) verbal noun of ṭāfa with bi of place, “encircling”; in the language of religious cults the running round or circumambulation of a sacred object, a stone, altar, etc. There are traces of the rite having existed among the Israelites, cf. especially Ps. xxvi. 6, and the ceremony of the feast of booths in the time of the Second Temple, where the altar is circumambulated once in the first six days and seven times on the seventh. The rite, however, was also found among Persians, Indians, Buddhists, Romans and others and is t…

(a.), religion, sect. Although the Arab philologists claim this term as a native Arabic word (cf. Nöldeke, in ZDMG, lvii ‘903], 413), their explanations are so farfetched as to render it almost certain that the term stems from Hebrew and Jewish and Christian Aramaic milla , Syriac melltā “utterance, word”, translating the Greek logos . It does not seem to have any pre-Islamic attestations, hence may have been a borrowing by Muḥammad himself. In the Ḳurʾān, it always means “religion”. It occurs fifteen times, including three ti…