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b. Riʾāb al-Asadiyya, one of the Prophet’s wives, whom he married after her divorce from Muḥammad’s freedman and adopted son Zayd b. Ḥārit̲h̲a [ q.v.]. Zaynab’s mother was a maternal aunt of the Prophet, Umayma bt. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, and her father, from the tribe of Asad, a client of the clan of ʿAbd S̲h̲ams. One of the first emigrants to Medina, she was a virgin (according to some traditions, a widow) when Muḥammad gave her in marriage to Zayd. In the year 4/626 Muḥammad saw Zaynab alone in her house, was taken with he…

( nisba Bahrānī), a tribe of the Ḳuḍāʿa group, sometimes reckoned a part of Ḏj̲ud̲h̲ām, which emigrated northwards to the Euphrates and then to the plain of Ḥimṣ. Like their Euphrates neighbours Tag̲h̲lib and Tanūk̲h̲, they became Christian, but were converted after Tag̲h̲lib, probably about 580. A deputation came to Muḥammad at Medina in 9/630 and became Muslims; but the tribe as a whole remained hostile and attached to Byzantium. In 8/629 Bahrāʾ had b…

, a town of the northeastern Deccan of India (lat. 18° 00’ N., long. 79° 35’ E.), important in mediaeval times as the centre of a Hindu princedom in the region of Telingāṇa [ q.v.]. It blocked the way to Muslim expansion from the central Deccan to the Bay of Bengal, hence was frequently involved in warfare during the 8th-9th/14th-15th centuries with the Dihlī Sultanate [ q.v.] and then the local northern Deccani sultanate of the Bahmanids [ q.v.]. Warangal lies on the eastern edge of the Deccan plateau some 130 km/70 miles to the southwest of the Godivari river. In mediaev…

, also Erič , Erač , on modern maps Erachh, a small town of north-central India, situated on the south bank of the Betwā river, 65 km/40 miles northeast of Jhansi and 100 km/62 miles southeast of Gwalior (lat. 25° 47′ N., long. 79° 9′ E.). It is now in the Jhansi District in the extreme southwest of Uttar Pradesh Province of the Indian Union. Although now within a region largely Hindu, the area round Irič is rich in Indo-Muslim remains and monuments. It was in Muslim hands by 709/1309, when the Ḵh̲ald̲j̲ī commander Malik Kāfūr [ q.v.] stayed at Irič, then renamed Sulṭānpūr, en route southwa…

(p.), New (Year’s) Day. 1. In the Islamic heartlands. The word is frequently represented in Arabic works in the form Nayrūz , which appears in Arabic literature as early as the verse of al-Ak̲h̲ṭal [ q.v.] (see al-D̲j̲awālīḳī, Muʿarrab , ed. A.M. S̲h̲ākir, Tehran 1966; al-Ḳalḳas̲h̲andī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿs̲h̲ā , ii, 408). It was the first day of the Persian solar year and is not represented in the Muslim lunar year (al-Masʿūdī, Murūd̲j̲ , iii, 416-17 = §§ 1301-2). In Achaemenid times, the official year began with Nawrūz, when the sun entered the Zodiac…

b. ʿAlī b. Ḳara yoluk ʿUt̲h̲mān , Abū Naṣr, born in 828/1425, died in 882/1478, and together with his grandfather, one of the most celebrated rulers of the line of Aḳ Ḳoyunlu Turkmens [ q.v.] and a statesman and military commander of genius. Expanding from his family’s base in Diyār Bakr [ q.v.], Uzun (“the Tall”) overcame his Ḳara Ḳoyunlu [ q.v] Turkmen rivals, and in the east defeated his rivals for control of Persia, the Tīmūrids [ q.v.], reigning 861-82/1457-78 over a powerful and extensive state which comprised western Persia and Kirmān as far as the borders of K̲h̲u…

, a historic region of the western part of the Indian subcontinent, and now the name of a province in the Indian Union. It is bounded by the Pakistan provinces of Sind and Pand̲j̲āb on the west and northwest, and by the Indian states of Pand̲j̲āb, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh on the northeast, Madhya Pradesh on the east, southeast and south, and Gud̲j̲arāt on the south. With an area of 342,267 km2/132,149 sq. miles, it is the second largest state in the Indian Union (after Madhya Pradesh), but because of its climate and habitat, has a less dense population than any ot…

(a.), masc. and fern, noun according to the lexicographers, standard pl. asliḥa , with suluḥ , sulḥān and silāḥāt also found in the lexica, the general term in Arabic for both offensive weapons and protective armour and equipment. This collective sense of the word is also often included in the general term ʿudda , literally “equipment, gear, tackle”. The sense of “weapon” has clearly no connection with that of the common Arabic verb salaḥa “to defecate”. Attestations of any parallel form of silāḥ are weak in Old South Arabian. One can only cite Biblical Hebrew šelaḥ ,…

(a.), pl. asnād , lit. “support, stay, rest”, but in Islamic administrative usage coming to mean an administrative, financial or legal document on which reliance can formally be placed ( masnūd ), hence an authenticated document. From the same root s-n-d is derived the technical term of Islamic tradition, isnād [ q.v. and ḥadīt̲h̲ ], literally “the act of making something rest upon something else”. The Turkish form of sanad , i.e. sened , was used in Ottoman practice for a document with e.g. a seal attached, thereby authenticating it and support…

, a town of northwestern Afg̲h̲ānistān (lat. 35° 55′ N., long. 64° 67′ E.), lying at an altitude of 2,854 feet/870 m. on the upper reaches of the Āb-i Maymana, one of the constituent streams of the Āb-i Ḳayṣar which peters out in the desert beyond Andk̲h̲ūy [ q.v.] and the sands of the Ḳi̊zi̊l Ḳum [ q.v.]. The site of the settlement seems to be ancient. The Vendidad speaks of Nisāya, and the ?8th century Armenian geography of Iran records Nsai-mianak = MP * Nisāk-i Miyānak “the Middle Nisā”, possibly identical with Ptolemy’s Νισαία in Margiana (Marquart, Ērānšahr , 78-9)…

(p.), literally “guest”, the equivalent of Ar. ḍayf [ q.v. for this sense]. The Persian word occurs in various compounds, such as mihmāndār and mihmān-k̲h̲āna . In Ṣafawid Persia, the mihmāndārs were officials appointed to receive and to provide hospitality for guests, including foreign ambassadors and envoys, with a court head official, the mihmāndār-bāshī , superintending these lesser persons. In Ḳād̲j̲ār times, the mihmāndārs seem to have been appointed ad hoc. See the references to the accounts of European travellers in Ṣafawid Persia (Chardin, Kaempfer, Sanso…

, Abu ’l-ʿAbbās , founder of the short-lived line of Maʾmūnid K̲h̲wārazm-S̲h̲āhs in K̲h̲wārazm [ q.v.]. Maʾmūn was governor, probably as a nominal vassal of the Sāmānids [ q.v.], in the town of Gurgand̲j̲ [ q.v.], which during the 4th/10th century had been prospering commercially at the expense of the ancient capital Kat̲h̲ [ q.v.], seat of the old-established line of Afrīg̲h̲id K̲h̲wārazm-S̲h̲āhs [see k̲h̲wārazm-s̲h̲āhs ]. In 385/995 the Afrīg̲h̲ids were overthrown and their dynasty extinguished, so that Maʾmūn became ruler of a unified K̲h̲wārazm. Very soon he was drawn into t…

, Tadmor , the ancient name, and that of modern Arabic usage, for the city of Palmyra. It lies in the Syrian Desert some 145 km/90 miles east of Ḥimṣ and 240 km/150 miles west of the middle Euphrates (lat. 34° 36′ N., long. 38° 15′ E., altitude 407 m/1,336 feet). From early times, Tadmur must have been a station on the caravan route connecting Mesopotamia with Syria, since the road on which it lay could pass through a gap in the southwest to northeastwards-running chain of hills: to the southwest of Tadmur, the Ḏj̲abal al-Ḵh̲anāzir, and to the n…

, Abū Ḥātim, Arab commander of the Umayyads and governor in Sīstān, d. 79/698. The Abū Bakra family were of mawlā origin, Abū Bakra’s father being apparently an Abyssinian slave. Although he married a free Arab wife from the Banū ʿId̲j̲l, ʿUbayd Allāh himself retained a dark and swarthy complexion, being described as adg̲h̲am ; an attempted filiation of the family to al-Ḥārit̲h̲ b. Kalada [ q.v. in Suppl.], the so-called "Physician of the Arabs", was later disallowed by the caliph al-Mahdī. The family prospered in Basra as partisans of the Umayyads and through…

, a clan of Ḳurays̲h̲ [ q.v.] in Mecca, with the genealogy Zuhra b. Kilāb b. Murra b. Kaʿb b. Luʾayy b. G̲h̲ālib b. Fihr. In pre-Islamic Mecca, the clan seems to have been prosperous, and members of it had trading connections with ʿAbd S̲h̲ams. In the factional disputes within Mecca, Zuhra were in the group led by ʿAbd Manāf, the Muṭayyabūn or “Perfumed Ones” [see laʿaḳat al-dam ] and then in the Ḥilf al-Fuḍūl [ q.v.] along with Hās̲h̲im and al-Muṭṭalib. The clan acquired Islamic kudos from the fact that the Prophet’s mother Āmina bt. Wahb [ q.v.] was from Zuhra. Early converts from the clan…

b. Umayya, a member of the Aʿyāṣ [ q.v. in Suppl.] component group of the Umayyad clan in Mecca and, later, governor of Kufa and Medina, died in 59/678-9, according to the majority of authorities. His father had fallen, a pagan, fighting the Muslims at the battle of Badr [ q.v.] on 2/624 when Saʿīd, his only son, can only have been an infant. He nevertheless speedily achieved great prestige in Islam not only as the leader of an aristocratic family group but also for his liberality, eloquence and learning. He ¶ was in especially high favour with ʿUt̲h̲mān, and was appointed by that cal…

, a sect which flourished in the central and eastern parts of the Islamic worlds, and especially in the Iranian regions, from the 3rd/9th century until the Mongol invasions. (1). Origins. The founder, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Karrām (thus vocalized by Samʿānī, who says that his father was a vine-tender, karrām , but there is some support for the readings Karām or Kirām), is known from biographies, in e.g. Samʿānī, Ansāb , fols. 476b-477a; D̲h̲ahabī, Mīzān al-iʿtidāl , Cairo 1325/1907, iii, 127; idem, Taʾrīk̲h̲ al-Islām , sub anno 255/869 (abridged version in Leiden Ms. 1721, fols…

, Abū D̲j̲aʿfar Hārūn b. al-Muʿtaṣim , ʿAbbāsid caliph. He was given the name Hārūn after his grandfather Hārūn al-Ras̲h̲īd; his mother was a Greek slave called Ḳarāṭīs. On the day that his father al-Muʿtaṣim bi ’llāh [ q.v.] died (18 Rabīʿ I 227/5 January 842), al-Wāt̲h̲iḳ was proclaimed his successor. Before al-Muʿtaṣim’s death, an alleged descendant of the Umayyads, named Abū Ḥarb, usually called al-Mubarḳaʿ [ q.v.] “the veiled one” from the veil that he always wore, had provoked a dangerous rising in Palestine, and Rad̲j̲āʾ b. Ayyūb al-Ḥiḍārī, whom al-Muʿta…

(a.), mud, clay. 1. In the Ḳurʾān, it is said that God created man from base clay (contrasted with the superior fire from which Iblīs [ q.v.] boasts he has been made), and ṭīn is the most commonly used word here for “clay” (together with e.g. turāb , ḥamāʾ ) See e.g. sūra VI, 2, VII, 11/12, XVII, 63/61’, XXIII, 12, XXXII, 6/7). Ṭīn is further used as the substance from which Jesus ¶ will create a live bird (III, 43/49, V, 110). On the general topic of creation from these materials, see k̲h̲alḳ , at IV, 981b, and further, ṭīna . 2. As the potter’s material. See for this, k̲h̲azaf . O…

, a town on the left bank of the Oxus river [see āmū daryā ] in mediaeval Islamic Central Asia. It lay some 190 km/120 miles upstream from Āmul-i S̲h̲aṭṭ [see āmul. 2.] in the direction of Tirmid̲h̲ [ q.v.], hence this Āmul was sometimes called “the Āmul of Zamm”, from Zamm’s being the next crossing-place along the river (see e.g. al-Balād̲h̲urī, Futūḥ , 410). Zamm was significant as a crossing-place connecting K̲h̲urāsān with Mā warāʾ al-nahr [ q.vv.]. It figures in historical accounts of the early Arab invasions of Transoxania as an entry-point for armies aiming at Payk…