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b. Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya I, last caliph of the Sufyānid line of the Umayyads, reigned briefly in 64/683-4. When Yazīd I b. Muʿāwiya [ q.v.] died at Ḥuwwārīn in the Syrian Desert in Rabīʿ I 64/November 683, he left behind Three young sons by free mothers; Muʿāwiya and his brother K̲h̲ālid b. Yazīd [ q.v.] cannot have been much more than 20 years old, Muʿāwiya’s age being given by the sources variously at between 17 and 23. Most of the surviving Sufyānids were in fact young and inexperienced, with their leadership qualities unproven. Yazīd had had the bayʿa [ q.v.] made to Muʿāwiya before his death…

, the main left bank affluent of the Jordan river [see al-urdunn. 1], famed in history as the site of a historic battle between the Arabs and Byzantines. 1. Geography. The Yarmūk flows into the Jordan some 9 km/5 miles to the south of Lake Tiberias, with headwaters on the southwestern slopes of the Ḥawrān [ q.v.] in southern Syria. It follows a deeply-incised valley which nevertheless provides the main access through the eastern wall of the Jordan rift valley, the G̲h̲awr or G̲h̲ōr, to the north-south routes along the western fringes of the Syrian De…

, S̲h̲araf al-Zamān Ṭāhir , presumably a native of Marw [see marw al-s̲h̲āhid̲j̲ān ] or a descendant of such a native, physician and writer on geography, anthropology and the natural sciences, died after 514/1120. He acted as physician to the Sald̲j̲ūḳ sultan Malik-S̲h̲āh [ q.v.] and possibly to his successors down to the time of Sand̲j̲ar [ q.v.]; little else is known of his life. His main fame comes from his book the Ṭabāʾiʿ al-ḥayawān , which is essentially zoological in subject, but also with valuable sections on human geography, i.e. the vari…

, a South Arabian tribe. In early Islamic times D̲j̲aʿda had lands in the southernmost part of the Yemen highlands, the Sarw Ḥimyar, between the present-day towns of al-Ḍāliʿ and Ḳaʿṭaba in the north and the Wādī Abyan in the south. The road from Aden to Ṣanʿāʾ passed through the territory, and their neighbours were the Banū Mad̲h̲ḥid̲j̲ and Banū Yāfiʿ. These South Arabian D̲j̲aʿda are described by Hamdānī as a clan of ʿAyn al-Kabr, and are to be distinguished from the North Arabian tribe of D̲j…

, a town of the Ḥid̲j̲āz in north-western Arabia, lying in what was the early Islamic Wādī ’l-Ḳurā, at the southeastern end of the Ḥarrat al-ʿUwayriḍ and below a hill called Umm Nāṣir (lat. 26° 38ʹ N., long. 37° 57ʹ E., altitude 674 m/2,210 feet). The area is extremely rich archaeologically, and clearly flourished in pre-Islamic times as a major centre along the caravan route southwards from Syria, with ancient Dedan at the base of the Ḏj̲abal al-Ḵh̲urayba, to the south of what was al-Ḥid̲j̲r [ q.v.] and is now Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ some 18 km/12 miles north of al-ʿUlā. The mediaeval Isl…

, S̲h̲ig̲h̲nān , a district on the upper Oxus, there known as the Pand̲j̲ River, extending over both banks from where the river leaves the district of Wak̲h̲ān [ q.v.] and turns directly northwards before flowing westwards again. The left bank part of S̲h̲ug̲h̲nān now falls within the Afg̲h̲ān province of Badak̲h̲s̲h̲ān [ q.v.] and the right bank one within the Pamir region of the former USSR, a division likewise reflected in the districts of G̲h̲ārān immediately to the north of S̲h̲ug̲h̲nān and Raws̲h̲ān to its south. The whole district is extrem…

Abū Naṣr Bahāʾ al-Dīn (330-416/942-1025), official and vizier of the Buy ids in Fārs. Beginning his career in high office as deputy to S̲h̲araf al-Dawla’s vizier Abū Manṣūr b. Ṣāliḥān, he subsequently became briefly vizier himself for the first time in 380/990 and for S̲h̲araf al-Dawla’s successor in S̲h̲īrāz. Bahāʾ al-Dawla [ q.v. in Suppl.]. He was vizier again in S̲h̲īrāz in Ḏj̲umādā I 386/May-June 996, this time for over three years, and in 390/1000 in Baghdād as deputy there for the vizier Abū ʿAlī al-Muwaffaḳ. Sābūr, although a native of S̲…

, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. Ḥasan, early poet in New Persian, of whom almost nothing is known but who must have flourished in the middle decades of the 4th/10th century, since odd verses of his survive that were allegedly dedicated to the Sāmānid Amir ʿAbd al-Malik (I) b. Nūḥ (I) (343-50/954-61), and he may have been at the court of the Ṣaffārid ruler of Sīstān, Ḵh̲alaf b. Aḥmad (352-93/963-1003). Fragments amounting to some 45 verses, mainly love poetry and satires, have been collected by G. Lazard, Les premiers poètes persans ( IX e-Xe siècles ), Tehran-Paris 1964…

(a.), “trafficking, trade, commerce”. 1. Introductory remarks. The term is taken in the Arabic lexica to be the maṣdar or verbal noun of tad̲j̲ara “to trade”. Like many of the terms in the Arabic commercial vocabulary, this is a loanword from Aramaic and Syriac. Jeffery thought ( pace earlier authorities as cited in Fraenkel, Die aramäischen Fremdwörter im Arabischen , 181-2, who derived tid̲j̲āra from an original noun tād̲j̲ir “merchant”, Syriac tagārā , verb ʾ et̲t̲agar “to trade”, cf. ʾ agrā “wage, fee, hire, reward”) that tid̲j̲āra should be derived directly from Aramaic and …

, Nisā , the name of several places in Persia. Yāḳūt enumerates Nasās in K̲h̲urāsān. Fārs, Kirmān and the district of Hamad̲h̲ān in D̲j̲ibāl, but W. Eilers has assembled a much larger number of Persian place names containing the element nasā ( r) or containing linguistic elements apparently connected with it. Scholars like Bartholomae and Marquart sought an etymology in Old Iranian śai- “to lie” (Grk. Κεῖσθαι), with the ideas of “settlement” or “low-lying place”; Eilers however explains it as from NP nasā, nasa ( r), nisā , “place lying in the shade (e.g. of a mountain)” ( Iranische Ortsname…

, the name of a hilly tract and a fortress of mediaeval India and Indo-Muslim times. It lies in a fold of the Salt Range, to the north of the Jhelum river in northern Pand̲j̲āb, and the place is still marked by ruins of a fortress and a Hindu temple near the modern Čao Saydān S̲h̲āh (lat. 32° 43′ N., long. 73° 17′ E.), in the Jhelum District of the Pand̲j̲āb province of Pakistan. The place is mentioned in early mediaeval Indo-Muslim history. In 404-5/1013-14 Maḥmūd of G̲h̲azna [ q.v.] attacked the Hindūs̲h̲āhīs [ q.v.] of northwestern India and marched against the Rād̲j̲ā Triločanapāla’s…

1. A river of Afg̲h̲ānistān and the Northwest Frontier region of Pākistān, 700 km. long and rising near the Unai Pass in lat. 34° 21′ N. and long. 68° 20′ E. It receives the affluents of the Pand̲j̲hīr, Alingar, Kunar and Swat Rivers from the north, and the Lōgar from the south, and flows eastwards to the Indian plain, joining the Indus at Atak (Attack). The Ḥudūd al-ʿālam (end of 4th/10th century) calls it “the River of Lamg̲h̲ān”, and describes it as flowing from the mountains bordering on Lamg̲h̲ān and Dunpūr, passing by Nangrahār (sc. …

(a.), active participle from the form IV verb as̲h̲rafa , literally “overseer, supervisor, controller”, the title of an official who appears at various times and with various duties in the history of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate and its successor states, from the Mag̲h̲rib to the eastern Islamic lands. 1. In the Arab and Persian lands. ¶ The office of is̲h̲rāf seems basically to have been a financial one. The supervision of financial operations was in the first century or so of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate usually entrusted to the dīwān al-zimām/al-azimma [see dīwān. i. The caliphate]; in the re…

or al-ruhāʾ , the Arabic name of a city which was in early Islamic times in the province of Diyār Muḍar [ q.v.] but known in Western sources as edessa (Syriac Orhāy, Armenian Uṛhay). It is now in the province of Diyarbakir in the southeast of modern Turkey and is known as Urfa, a name for the city which is not clearly attested before the coming of the Turks to eastern Anatolia. 1. In pre-Islamic times. The city is probably an ancient one, though efforts to identify it with the Babylonian Erech/Uruk or with Ur of the Chaldees cannot be taken seriously. Its site, at the j…

, a seaport at the eastern tip of the peninsula of that name at the eastern end of the Crimea [see ḳri̊m ] in the modern Crimean oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. The district was clearly a well-populated one in pre-historic, Cimmerian and Scythian times, since it contains a large number of kurgans or burial mounds, many of which have been excavated since the last century. In classical times, it was from the 6th century B.C. onwards the site of the flourishing Ionian Greek colony of Pantikapaion, later called Bosporos and the cap…

means etymologically “a patch of ground marked out from adjoining land by a difference in colour, etc.” or “a low-lying region with stagnant water” (see Lane, s.v.); the latter sense is obviously at the base of the plural Biḳāʿ [ q.v.] to designate the (originally) marshy valley between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges in Syria, and doubtless at that of the name al-Buḳayʿa for a settlement near the Lake of Ḥimṣ [ q.v.] (see Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems , 352). From these senses it acquires the broader one of “province, region, tract of la…

, Abū Kālīd̲j̲ār Marzubān, S̲h̲ams al-Milla (353-88/964-98), Buyid amir and eldest son of ʿAḍud al-Dawla [ q.v.]. On his father’s death in S̲h̲awwāl 372/March 983, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla succeeded to power as amīr al-umarāʾ , but his position was immediately disputed by another brother, S̲h̲araf al-Dawla S̲h̲īrzīl, who seized Fārs and Ḵh̲ūzistān. From his base in ʿIrāḳ, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla had also to combat the Kurdish chief Bād̲h̲, ancestor of the Marwānid dynasty [see marwānids ] of Diyār Bakr, who had seized various towns in al-Ḏj̲azīra and who even for a while held Mawṣil.…

, D̲j̲abal , a mountainous and, in early Islamic times, apparently wooded region of the Kirmān province in Iran, described by the mediaeval historians and geographers as the haunt of predatory peoples like the Kūficīs or Ḳufṣ and the Balūč [see balūcistān , kirmān and ḳufṣ ]. It is the steepsided granite chain running in a NW-SE direction from the mountain massif of central Kirmān (sc. the massif which culminates in such peaks as the Kūh-i Hazār and the Kūh-i Lālazār), to the south of the towns of Bam [ q.v.] and Fahrad̲j̲; the geographers count it as amongst the garmsīrāt or warm regions [see ḳi̊s…

, Ṣadr al-Dīn Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Nāṣir b. ʿAlī , author of the late Sald̲j̲ūḳ period and early decades of the 7th/13th century, whose work is known to us through its incorporation within an anonymous history of the Sald̲j̲ūḳs and succeeding Atabegs of Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān, the Ak̲h̲bār al-Dawla al-sald̲j̲ūḳiyya (ed. Muhammad Iqbal, Lahore ¶ 1933; Tkish. tr. Necati Lugal, Ankara 1943; cf. Brockelmann, I2, 392, Suppl. I, 554-5). Al-Ḥusaynī apparently composed the Zubdat al-tawārīk̲h̲ , ak̲h̲bār al-umarāʾ wa ’l-mulūk al-sald̲j̲ūḳiyya , which forms the first…

, the Arabic name for the Jordan River, used also from early Islamic times onwards to designate the regions adjacent to the river’s course. 1. The river This appears in Arabic as the nahr al-Urdunn , in Old Testament and later Hebrew as ha-ϒardēn , and in the Septuagint and the classical geographers as ô ’Ιορδάνης. After the Crusading period, local Arabic usage often referred to it as al-S̲h̲arīʿa [ al-kabīra ] “the [Great] watering-place”. It was, and still is, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims, by Christians in particular on account of…

(a.), pl. ṣawāʾif (< ṣayf ‘‘summer”), summer raid or military expedition (see Lane, 1756; Dozy, Supplément, i, 857). 1. In the Arab-Byzantine warfare. The term is used by the early Islamic historians to denote the raids of the Arabs into Byzantine Anatolia. These were normally mounted annually, over a period of some two centuries, beginning during the governorship in Syria of Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān [ q.v.], i.e. from ca. 640 onwards. They tailed off in the 3rd/9th century as the ʿAbbāsid caliphate became racked by internal discord and as the Macedonian emperors i…

, Ruwāndiz , a town of Kurdish ʿIrāḳ, the chef-lieu of a ḳaḍāʾ in the liwāʾ of Irbil. In ca. 1940 it had a population of 7,000. It lies in lat. 36° 37ʹ N. and long. 44° 33ʹ E. at an altitude of ca. 914 m/3,000 feet on a route which connects Mawṣil and Irbil [ q.vv.] via the Garū S̲h̲inka pass (1,830 m/6,000 feet) with Mahābād/Sāwd̲j̲-Bulāḳ [ q.vv.]. The route was described in early Islamic times only by Yāḳūt, enumerating seven stages from Mawṣil to Sāwd̲j̲-Bulāḳ. History. It will be evident that Rawāndiz, situated at the intersection of the communications of…

(in Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iv, 16, Ṭabarstarān), a district of the eastern Caucasus, essentially the basin of the Rūbās river which runs into the Caspian Sea just south of Darband [see derbend ], the early Islamic Bāb al-Abwāb [ q.v.]. It now comes within the southernmost part of Dāg̲h̲istān (see map in ḳabḳ , at IV, 344). Its population comprises Caucasian mountaineers plus a considerable admixture of Iranian speakers of Tātī dialect [see tāt ]. At the time of the Umayyad prince Marwān b. Muḥammad’s raids through the Caucasus, there was a Ṭabarsarān S̲h̲āh (known a…

, a district of eastern Afg̲h̲ānistān, ¶ thus designated in the Islamic sources of the later mediaeval period, deriving its name from its urban centre Lamg̲h̲ān (later form, Lag̲h̲mān). It comprises the fertile plain of the middle course of the Kābul River, much of it lying to the north and east of Kābul city [ q.v.] itself. It is bounded on the north by the mountains of Kāfiristān [ q.v.], modern Nūristān, and includes the lower reaches of the Alingār and Alis̲h̲ang Rivers; on the south and east, it adjoins, and was sometimes considered (e.g. by Bābur) to includ…

(a.), literally, “something made obscure, hidden”. 1. In the sense of word puzzle, riddle [see lug̲h̲z ]. 2. In the sense of secret writing, code. Codes were regularly used in classical Antiquity. Thus the skytalē of the Spartans, mentioned by Plutarch, in which a message was written on a parchment or leather ribbon which was wrapped round a tapered wooden baton for purposes of writing and then could only be read by a recipient possessing a baton of the same shape and size, is an early example of a typical …

(p.), literally “cool water”, often found in the Arabised form sirdāb , an underground chamber used for keeping cool during the extreme heat of e.g. the ʿIrāḳī or Persian summers. Such building constructions are an ancient feature of Middle Eastern life, being found amongst the Egyptians of Pharaonic times and in Babylonia. Examples of them have been found in the remains of the early ʿAbbāsid palace at al-Uk̲h̲ayḍir [ q.v.] and at al-Muʿtaṣim’s palace, the D̲j̲awsaḳ al-K̲h̲āḳānī, at Sāmarrā. At Bag̲h̲dād until recent times, traditional-type houses had a semi-base…

, a line of military commanders who governed the northwestern provinces of the caliphate (Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān. Arrān and Armenia) in the later 3rd/9th and early 4th/10th centuries on behalf of the ʿAbbāsids. The Sād̲j̲ids were just some of several commanders, originally from the Iranian East and Central Asia, who came westwards to serve in the early ʿAbbāsid armies. The family seems to have originated in Us̲h̲rūsana [ q.v.] on the middle Syr Darya in Transoxania, the region where the Afs̲h̲īns [ q.v.] were hereditary princes until at least the end of the 3rd/9th century, and w…

, a small town of Persian Kurdistan, now the chef-lieu of a s̲h̲ahrastān or county in the province of Kurdistān (lat. 36° 14′ N., long. 46° 15′ E.). It lies on the western side of the upper D̲j̲ag̲h̲atū Čay valley some 77 km/50 miles to the southeast of Mahābād [ q.v.] and on the road southwards to Sanandad̲j̲ and Kirmāns̲h̲āh [ q.vv.]. The Kurdish population are from the Mukrī tribe, S̲h̲āfiʿī Sunnīs and with the Naḳs̲h̲bandī Ṣūfī order influential amongst them. In the early 20th century, the local k̲h̲ān was a relative of the wālī s of Ardalān and Sanandad̲j̲. In ca. 1950 Saḳḳiz town had a po…

, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. D̲j̲aʿfar , ʿAbbāsid caliph, reigned 252-5/866-9, and son of the earlier caliph al-Mutawakkil [ q.v.] by his favourite slave concubine Ḳabīḥa. The reign of al-Muʿtazz’s predecessor, his cousin al-Mustaʿīn [ q.v.], ended in strife and violence stirred up by the Turkish guards in Sāmarrā. Al-Mustaʿīn was forced to abdicate at Bag̲h̲dād, and on 4 Muḥarram 252/25 January 866, al-Muʿtazz, having been brought out of jail, was hailed as caliph. The first part of the succession arrangements envisaged towards t…

, a district and fortress of northern Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān, famous as being the headquarters of the Ḵh̲urramī rebel Bābak [ q.v.] in the first decades of the 3rd/9th century. The exact site is uncertain, but it must have lain in the modern Ḳarad̲j̲a-Dag̲h̲, older Maymad, the ancient Armenian region of Pʿaytakaran, to the north of Ahar and south of the Araxes River, near Mount Has̲h̲tād-Sar, at some spot between the modern districts of Hārand, Kalaybar and Garmādūz (V. Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian history, London 1953, 116 and Addenda et corrigenda slip). Bābak’s fortress there…

b. Mart̲h̲ad b. Ḥāzim al-ʿAbsī al-G̲h̲aṭafānī . governor of Egypt 90-6/709-14 for the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik. Ḳurra came from the group of North Arab tribes which had settled extensively in northern Syria and the D̲j̲azīra and which were in the forefront of the warfare along the Taurus Mountains with Byzantium. He himself came from the region of Ḳinnasrīn [ q.v.] to the south of Aleppo, and was thus a member of the experienced and capable cadre of Syrian Arabs whom the Umayyads liked to appoint to high civil and military office; the fact …

, a district of the upper Oxus region mentioned at the time of the Arab invasions. It lay near the head waters of the Kāfirnihān and Surkhān rivers, hence in the upper mountainous parts of Čag̲h̲āniyān and K̲h̲uttalān [ q.vv.]. In Chinese sources such as Hiuen-Tsang, it appears as Su-man. In al-Ṭabarī, ii, 1179, 1181, where the conquests of the governor Kutayba b. Muslim [ q.v.] in upper K̲h̲urāsān during 86/705 are being described, S̲h̲ūmān is linked with Ak̲h̲arūn or K̲h̲arūn as being under a local prince, whose name seems to be the Iranian one *Gus̲h̲tāspā…

, conventionally Zerafshan , a landlocked river of Central Asia, now coming within Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In early Islamic times, it was known as “the river of Sogdia”, Nahr Ṣug̲h̲d [see ṣug̲h̲d ] or “the river of Buk̲h̲ārā” (see al-Yaʿḳūbī, Buldān , 293-4, tr. Wiet, 1 lull; al-Iṣṭak̲h̲rī, 319-21; Ibn Ḥawḳal, ed. Kramers, ii, 495-7, tr. Kramers and Wiet, ii, 475-7; Ḥudūd al-ʿālam , tr. Minorsky, 55, 73, comm. 198, 211). It flowed westwards from sources in what the geographers called the Buttamān mountains, in fact, between what are…

(a. “wells, springs”), modern Biyārd̲j̲umand, a small town on the northern edges of the Great Desert, the Das̲h̲t-i Kavīr, of Persia. The mediaeval geographers describe it as being three days’ journey from Bisṭām and 25 farsak̲h̲s from Dāmg̲h̲ān, and as falling administratively within the province of Ḳūmis [ q.v.], although in Sāmānid times (4th/10th century) it seems to have been attached to Nīs̲h̲āpūr in Ḵh̲urāsān. It was the terminus of an only-moderately frequented route across the northeastern corner of the desert to Turs̲h̲īz in Ḳūhistān. We have in Muḳaddasī, 356-7, 372, …

(thus in Ras̲h̲īd al-Dīn and Mustawfī), popular pronunciation with assimilation Lam(m)asar < Lambasar, the name of one of the Ismāʿīlī ¶ fortresses in northwestern Iran taken over from a local chief by Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ’s lieutenant and eventual successor Kiyā Buzurg-Ummīd, according to D̲j̲uwaynī in 495/1102 [see alamūt , ismāʿīliyya ]. Its still-extensive ruins lie on a site sloping at 30°, whose surface resembles in shape a truncated cone and which measures some 1,500 ft./480 m. by 600 ft/190 m., with easily defensible slopes, in the Rūdbār di…

, a region of the North-West Frontier region of what is now Pākistān, lying roughly between lats. 34° 30′ and 35° 50′ N. and long. 72° and 73° E. It is bounded on the north-west by Čitrāl, on the west by Dīr, on the east by Bunēr and Hazāra and on the south by Mardān. It comprises essentially the basin of the Swāt River, from its headwaters down to the Malakand Pass, after which it runs into the Kabul River below Pes̲h̲awar and near Naws̲h̲ēra. The nor…

(a.), the verbal noun of form II of d̲j̲-m-r meaning basically “to come together”. In early Islamic military and administrative ¶ usage, d̲j̲ammara had the meaning of “to keep the troops quartered on distant frontiers, far away from their families” (see LʿA 1, v, 217). The caliph ʿUmar is said to have disapproved of this, as leading to discontent and rebelliousness amongst the Arab warriors. But once the initial phase of the Arab conquests was over, the muḳātila found themselves fighting in distant, climatically and topographically difficult environ…

, S̲h̲aʿyā (?), author in the 4th/10th century of a concise Arabic encyclopaedia of the sciences the D̲j̲awāmiʿ al-ʿulūm “Connections of the sciences”. The author wrote in the upper Oxus lands, and dedicated his work to the Muḥtād̲j̲id amīr of Čag̲h̲āniyān [ q.v.], Abū ʿAlī Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar (d. 344/955). Minorsky surmised from his name (if this has been interpreted correctly) that he was a scion of the Farīg̲h̲ūnids [ q.v.] in northern Afg̲h̲ānistān, rulers of the district of Gūzgān [ q.v.] as tributaries of the Sāmānids, and latterly, of the G̲h̲aznawids; a co…

, Abu ’l-Fatḥ G̲h̲iyāt̲h̲ al-Dunyā wa ’l-Din , Sald̲j̲ūḳ sultan in ʿIrāḳ and western Persia 529-47/1134-52. Like the other sons of Muḥammad b. Malik-S̲h̲ah [ q.v.], Masʿūd was entrusted as a child to the tutelage of Turkish Atabegs [see atabak ], latterly with Ay-Aba D̲j̲uyūs̲h̲ Beg acting thus, and given the appanage of Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān and al-D̲j̲azīra: at D̲j̲uyūs̲h̲ Beg’s prompting, Masʿūd unsuccessfully rebelled in 514/1120 at the age of 12 against his elder brother Sultan Maḥmūd b. Malik-S̲h̲āh [ q.v.], but was pardoned. When Maḥmūd died in 525/1131, a period of confusio…

, Dungans , in Chinese, T’ung-kan, the Turkic name given to those Hui (i.e. ethnically Chinese Muslims) settled within Chinese Turkestan or Sinkiang [ q.v.], especially in the northern Sinkiang regions of Dzungaria and Kumul, but numerous also in the northwestern provinces of China proper such as Kansu [ q.v.] (Gansu), Ninghsia [ q.v.], Shensi [ q.v.] (Shaanxi) and Tsinghai. The Tungans in Sinkiang were estimated at 92,000 in the mid-1940s, and played a considerable political and military role there during the Chinese Republican or Kuomintang period (191…

, a forested, mountain area of Inner Asia which had a special religious and moral significance for the early Turkish peoples. It seems to have been located in the eastern part of the Khangai Mts. around the headwaters of the Orkhon and Tamir rivers (the latter river corresponding, according to R. Giraud, L’Empire des Turcs célestes . Les règnes d’Elterich , Qapghan et Bilga ( 680-734), Paris 1960, 207, to the i̊duḳ yer sub “sacred places and watercourses” of the old Turkish inscriptions), generally along the co-ordinates of…

, a mediaeval Islamic town in eastern Anatolia/western Armenia. It lay, at a site whose definite location is unknown, on the left bank of the southern headwater of the upper Euphrates, the classical Arsanias, modern Murad Su. Its location was, according to Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iii, 362-3, between Bālūya (modern Palu) and Hiṣn Ziyād or K̲h̲artpirt [ q.v.] (modern Harput), and it is not to be confused with Sumaysāṭ [ q.v.] on the Euphrates further south. It was in the borderland between the Arabs and the Greeks, and possession of it must have oscillated between…

, the Uyg̲h̲ur Turkish leader of a Muslim rebellion at Ḳomul [ q.v. in Suppl.] in Eastern Turkistan or Sinkiang [ q.v.] during the 1930s, b. 1888, d. ? in the mid-1970s. In 1928 the second Republican Chinese governor of Sinkiang, Chin Shu-jen, overthrew the last autonomous k̲h̲ānate of Central Asia, that of Ḳomul in the extreme eastern end of the province, adjacent to the frontiers ¶ with Mongolia and Kansu. His anti-Muslim policies provoked a rebellion there in April 1931 of the Uyg̲h̲urs, and possibly some of the Tungans [ q.v.], under the joint leadership of Yulbārs K̲h̲ān, who had…

, the later form of a word Tāzīk or Tāžīk used in the Iranian and Turkish worlds. In Islamic usage, it eventually came to designate the Persians, as opposed to the Turks. 1. Etymology and early linguistic development of the term. The traditional explanation of the term goes back at least to E. Quatremère, Histoire des sultans mamelouks de l’Egypte , ii/2, Paris 1845, 154-5, and was set forth, e.g., in Barthold’s EI 1 art. This derives Tāzīk, etc./Tād̲j̲īk from the name of the Arab tribe of Ṭayyiʾ [ q.v.], Syriac Ṭayyāyē, meaning “Arabs”, said to have been the first Arab tribe encoun…

b. Umayya b. Ḥārit̲h̲a al-Sulamiyya, an early supporter of Muḥammad’s cause at Mecca and an associate of his. She was the daughter of a man of Sulaym [ q.v.] who had come to Mecca and had become a confederate there of ʿAbd Manāf, and of a woman of ʿAbd S̲h̲ams b. ʿAbd Manāf; hence K̲h̲awla was related maternally to the Prophet himself. She was an early convert to the new teaching, in company with her husband, the ascetic ʿUt̲h̲mān b. Maẓʿūn [ q.v.]. When he died in 3/624-5, K̲h̲awla is said to have “offered herself” ( wahabatnafsahā ) to Muḥammad, but the latter “put her off” ( ard̲j̲aʾahā …

, Kuram , the name of a river which flows down from the western end of the Safīd Kūh or Spīn G̲h̲ar range of the Hindū Kus̲h̲-Koh-i Bābā massif of eastern Afg̲h̲ānistān and which joins the Indus River in modern Pakistan just below ʿĪsā K̲h̲ēl. The lower course of the river flows through Bannū [ q.v.], and the middle reaches through the northernmost part of Wazīristān [ q.v.]. The upper valley, beyond the railhead of Thāl, forms what in British India and now in Pakistan is the administrative region of the Kurram Agency, a thin wedge of territory some 70 miles lo…

, Sultan of the G̲h̲aznawid dynasty [ q.v.], reigned 388-421/998-1030 in the eastern Islamic lands. Abu ’l-Ḳāsim Maḥmūd was the eldest son of the Turkish commander Sebüktigin, who had risen from being one of the slave personal guards of the Ḥād̲j̲ib-i buzurg or commander-in-chief Alptigin [see alp takīn ] under the Sāmānids to becoming the virtually independent amīr of a principality centred on G̲h̲azna [ q.v.], at that time on the far eastern fringe of the Sāmānid empire. Maḥmūd was born in 361/971, his mother being from the local Iranian (?) gentry stock of Zābulistān [ q.v.], the distri…

, the ancient Rag̲h̲ā, a city in the old Persian region of Media, during Islamic times in the province of D̲j̲ibāl [ q.v.]. Its ruins may be seen about 5 miles south-southeast of Tehran [ q.v.] to the south of a spur projecting from Elburz into the plain. The village and sanctuary of S̲h̲āh ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm lie immediately south of the ruins. The geographical importance of the town lies in the fact that it was situated in the fertile zone which lies between the mountains and the desert, by which from time immemorial communication ha…

, an important settlement in Nad̲j̲d during mediaeval times, now a village, situated in lat. 27° 8’ N. and long 42° 28’ E. It lies on a plain in the borderlands between the two regions of the D̲j̲abal S̲h̲ammar to the north-west and al-Ḳaṣīm [ q.v.] to the south-east, some 80 miles/130 km. south-east of Ḥāʾil [ q.v.]. The early Islamic geographers locate it in the territory where the pasture grounds of the B. Ṭayyiʾ and the B. Asad marched together, near to the frequently-mentioned “two mountains of Ṭayyiʾ”, sc. Salmā and Ad̲j̲āʾ. Bakrī, followed by Samhūdī, describes it as a famous ḥimā [ q.v.] o…

, Nirāḳ , a small town of Persia (lat. 34° 00′ N., long. 50° 49′ E.), in the modern province of Ḳum, 60 km/38 miles to the west of Kās̲h̲ān and at the northwestern end of the Kūh-i Kargas. It is not mentioned in the classical Islamic geographers, but has some fame as the origin of the scholar Muḥammad Mahdī b. Abī D̲h̲arr Nirāḳī (d. ?1209/1794-5), author of Persian and Arabic works on rhetoric, the S̲h̲īʿī martyrs, mathematics, etc. (Storey, i, 219-20, iii, 213; Brockelmann, S II, 824) and of his son Mullā Aḥmad Nirāḳī (d. 1244/1828-9), theologian and poet with the tak̲h̲alluṣ of Ṣafāʾī (Browne, LHP…

, Abū Ḥassān al-Ḥasan b. ‘Ut̲h̲mān al-S̲h̲īrāzī (this nisba from some apparent connection with the Persian city; see Yāḳūt, Buldān , ed. Beirut, iii, 381), judge, traditionist and historian of the early ʿAbbāsid period, b. 156/773 in Bag̲h̲dād and died there Rad̲j̲ab 242/Nov.-Dec. 856 (al-Ṭabarī, iii, ¶ 1434, and al-K̲h̲aṭīb al-Bag̲h̲dādī) or the following year. A traditionalist in his views and associate of al-S̲h̲āfiʿī, he was questioned under the Miḥna [ q.v.] at the end of al-Maʾmūn’s reign (al-Ṭabarī, iii, 1121-5, 1128, 1132). But he came into his own under th…

(p.) “scribe, secretary”, the term generally used in the Persian cultural world, including the Indo-Muslim one (although in the later centuries it tended to be supplanted by the term munshī , so that Yule-Burnell, Hobson-Jobson , a glossary of Anglo-Indian colloquial words and phrases, London 1886, 328, record “dubeer” as being in their time “quite obsolete in Indian usage”), as the equivalent of Arabic kātib and Turkish yazi̊d̲j̲i̊ ,. The word appears as dipīr / dibīr (Pahlavi orthography dpy ( w) r, see D.N. MacKenzie, A concise Pahlavi dictionary, London 1971, 26) in Sāsānid Per…

, S̲h̲ams al-Maʿālī Abu’l-Ḥasan (reigned 366-71/977-81 and ¶ 388-403/998 to 1012-13), fourth ruler of the Ziyārid dynasty which had been founded by Mardāwīd̲j̲ b. Ziyār [ q.v.] and which ruled in Ṭabaristān and Gurgān (Ḏj̲urd̲j̲ān). Like other families rising to prominence in the “Daylamī interlude” of Persian history, the Ziyārids endeavoured to attach themselves to the pre-Islamic Iranian past, and Ḳābūs’s grandson Kay Kāʾūs makes Ḳābūs’s ancestors rulers of Gīlān in the time of Kay K̲h̲usraw ( Ḳābūs-nāma , Preface). As under his predecessors, suze…

, Modern Hebrew Nāṣerat, Nazareth, the home of Jesus, a town of northern Palestine, since 1948 in Israel, situated in lat. 32° 42’ N. and long. 35° 17’E. at a height of 505 m/1,600 ft. It lies in a depression sloping to the south surrounded by hills in a fertile district. While the hills to the north and northeast are not very high, in the northwest the D̲j̲ebel al-Sīk̲h̲ rises to 1,600 feet above sealevel. The name of the town, which does not occur in the Old Testament, is found in the New and in the Greek fathers of the Church …

b. Ḵh̲anzal al-Kindī, Abu ’l-Miḳdām or Abū Naṣr (full nasab in Gottschalk, 331, from Ibn ʿAsākir), a rather mysterious mawlā or client who seems to have been influential as a religious and political adviser at the courts of the early Marwānid caliphs, from ʿAbd al-Malik to ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. His birth date is unknown, but he died in 112/730, probably around the age of seventy. According to one account, Rad̲j̲ahʾ’s family stemmed from Maysān in Lower ʿIrāḳ, hence from the local Nabaṭ or Aramaeans, where the bond of walā with the Arab tribe of Kinda [ q.v.] must have been made, the Kinda…

, the name of a group of peoples inhabiting the central mountains of Afghānistān; they form one of the principal population elements of the country, amounting perhaps to 900,000. The Hazāras are almost certainly an Ethnically mixed group, whose components may or may not be related to each other. In appearance, Hazāras are predominantly brachycephalous, with Mongoloid facial features, though this is by no means universal. There is therefore much in favour of Schurmann’s hypothesis that the Hazāras of the core region, the Hazārad̲j̲āt [ q.v. above], at least, are a mixed populatio…

(p.), a term denoting a rank of officer or commander in mediaeval Persian armies and paramilitary groups (cf. Vuller, Lexicon persicolatinum, ii, 261-2, 293; dux exercitus, praefectus ). Thus the sarhangs were leaders of bands of ʿayyārs [ q.v.] or Sunnī orthodox vigilantes combatting the K̲h̲ārid̲j̲īs in 3rd/9th century Sīstān, and Yaʿḳūb b. al-Layt̲h̲, founder of the Ṣaffārid dynasty [ q.v.], embarked on his rise to power by becoming a sarhang in the ʿayyār forces of a local leader in Bust, Ṣāliḥ b. al-Naḍr al-Kinānī ( Taʾrīk̲h̲-i Sīstān , ed. Bahār, passim; Gardīzī, Zayn al-ak̲h̲bār …

, D̲j̲abal al-Ḳabḳ (the most common rendering), al-Ḳabk̲h̲ ( e.g., Masʿūdī) or al-Ḳabd̲j̲ ( e.g. Ṭabarī, Yāḳūt), Turkish Kavkaz, the name given by the Muslims to the Caucasus Mountains. The form ḳabḳ may derive from Middle Persian kāfkōh “the mountain of Kāf”, Armenian kapkoh ; in Firdawsī we find the Caucasus called kūh-i ḳāf (Hübschmann, Armenische Grammatik , i, 45, cf. Marquart, Ērānšahr , 94). A village called Ḳabḳ is also mentioned by Ibn Rusta, 173, tr. Wiet, 201, as being the first stage on the road from Harāt to Isfizār and Sīstān. 1. Topography and ethnology. The Caucasus became k…

, a great and powerful Bedouin tribe of Central Arabia, second only in importance to the ʿAnaza or ʿUnayza [ q.v.], and playing a significant role in the history of Arabia in the last 150 years or so. Doughty describes them as having pasture grounds extending from al-Ṭāʾif [ q.v.] in the Ḥid̲j̲āz in the west to al-Ḳaṣīm [ q.v.] in northern Nad̲j̲d in the east. The name appears in various renderings in the travel accounts of Europeans, e.g. the ʿAteyba, pl. elʿAteybân of Doughty, and the ʾOṭeybah of Palgrave; according to J.J. Hess, the modern pronunciation use…

, the name found in early Islamic times for a region of what is now eastern Afg̲h̲anistān, roughly covering the modern Afg̲h̲ān provinces of G̲h̲aznī and Zābul. The early geographers describe what was a remote region on the far eastern frontiers of the Dār al-Islām in understandably vague terms as an extensive province with G̲h̲azna [ q.v.] as its centre. It thus emerges that it lay between Kābul and the Kābul river valley on the north and the territories around the confluence of the Helmand river and Arg̲h̲andāb known as Zamīndāwar and al-Ruk̲h̲k̲h̲ad̲j̲ [ q.vv.], but the boundaries her…

the nisba or gentilic of several Egyptian scholars of the Mamlūk and early Ottoman periods, the most important of whom are as follows: (1.) S̲h̲ihāb al-Dīn Abu ’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī (ʿAbd Allāh?) b. Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Fazārī al-S̲h̲āfiʿī, legal scholar and secretary in the Mamlūk chancery, and author of several books. The main sources for his life are the fairly brief mentions of him in biographical and historical sources of the late Mamlūk period by al-ʿAynī, al-Maḳrīzī, Ibn Tag̲h̲rībirdī, al-Sak̲h̲āwī and Ibn …

(a.) means basically "wood, piece of wood, plank, spar" (pls. aʿwād , ʿīdān ). I. In daily life 1. ʿŪd as perfume and incense and as a medicament In the Arabic materia medica it indicates the so-called "aloe wood". This designation, used in trade, is conventional but incorrect because aloe wood is called ṣabr [ q.v.]. ʿŪd has to do with certain kinds of resinous, dark-coloured woods with a high specific weight and a strong aromatic scent, which were used in medicine as perfume and incense ( ʿūd al-bak̲h̲ūr ) and were highly coveted because of their rarity and v…

b. ʿAbd S̲h̲ams , ancestor of the Umayyads, the principal clan of the Ḳuraysh of Mecca. His genealogy (Umayya b. ʿAbd S̲h̲ams b. ʿAbd Manāf b. Ḳuṣayy) and his descendants are given in Wüstenfeld, Geneal . Tabellen , U, V, and Ibn al-Kabbī, in Caskel-Strenziok, i, nos. 8 ff. Like all other eponyms of Arab tribes and clans, his actual existence and the details of his life have to be accepted with caution, but too great scepticism with regard to tradition would be as ill-advised as absolute faith in its statement…

(p.), the Peacock Throne, a name given to various highly-decorated and much bejewelled royal thrones in the eastern Islamic world, ¶ in particular, to that constructed for the Mug̲h̲al Emperor S̲h̲āh D̲j̲ahān (1037-68/1628-57 [ q.v.]). There are relevant accounts in the contemporary Indo-Muslim sources, e.g. in ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Lāhawrī’s Bāds̲h̲āh-nāma and Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ’s ʿAmal-i Ṣāliḥ , and in the accounts of European travellers who claimed to have seen the throne, such as Tavernier, Bernier and Manucci. These last authorities, …

, siege. The following articles deal with siegecraft and siege warfare. On fortification see burd̲j̲ , ḥiṣn , ḳalʿa and sūr . i.— General Remarks Siege warfare was one of the essential forms of warfare when it was a matter of conquest, and not merely of plundering raids, in countries in which, from ancient times, most of the large towns had been protected by walls and where, during the Middle Ages, the open countryside was to an ever increasing extent held by fortresses [see ḥiṣn and ḳalʿa ]. Although the forces available were rarely sufficient to impose a co…

(a.), pi. subul , literally “way, road, path”, a word found frequently in the Ḳurʾān and in Islamic religious usage. 1. As a religious concept. Associated forms of the Arabic word are found in such Western Semitic languages as Hebrew and Aramaic, and also in Epigraphic South Arabian as s 1 bl (see Joan C. Biella, Dictionary of Old South Arabic , Sabaean dialect, Cambridge, Mass. 1982, 326). A. Jeffery, following F. Schwally, in ZDMG, liii (1899), 197, surmised that sabīl was a loanword in Ḳurʾānic usage, most likely taken from Syriac, where s̲h̲ebīlā has both the l…

(t., < ḳi̊s̲h̲ “winter”), winter quarters, originally applied to the winter quarters, often in warmer, low-lying areas, of pastoral nomads in Inner Asia, and thence to those in regions like Persia and Anatolia into which Türkmens and others from Central Asia infiltrated, bringing with them their nomadic ways of life; Kās̲h̲g̲h̲arī, Dīwān lug̲h̲āt al-turk , tr. Atalay, i, 464-5, defines ḳi̊s̲h̲laḳ as al-mus̲h̲attā . Its antonym is yaylaḳ “summer quarters” (< yay “spring”, later “summer”), denoting the upland pastures favou…

, an Iranian family of K̲h̲urāsān prominent in the cultural and social worlds there and also active as local administrators and town officials under the Sāmānids and early G̲h̲aznawids [ q.vv.]. They were apparently of Sog̲h̲dian origin, and amongst their pre-Islamic forebears is mentioned the Prince of Pand̲j̲kent S̲h̲īr Dīvāstič, killed at Mount Mug̲h̲ by the Arabs in 104/722-3 [see mā warāʾ al-nahr. 2. History]; al-Samʿānī traces the family back to the Sāsānids Yazdagird II and Bahrām Gūr ( K. al-Ansāb , facs. edn., fols. 548b-549b). It must neverthe…

, Arabised form of Persian Kūfičīs, a people inhabiting south eastern Persia, more exactly the Kirmān-western Balūčistān region, in early mediaeval Islamic times. The name, literally “mountain dwellers”, probably stems ultimately from O. Pers. ākaufačiya — (< O. Pers. kaufa- “mountain”), the name of a people in the Daiva inscription of Xerxes, who are mentioned together with the mačiya “men of Maka” (= Makrān, the coastal region of Balūčistān?), via N. Pers. kūfid̲j̲ / kūfič (cf. R. G. Kent, Old Persian grammar, texts , lexicon 2, New Haven 1953, 151, 165). In early Islamic sour…

, a line of Atabegs or Turkish slave commanders who governed most of northwestern Persia, including Arrān, most of Ād̲h̲arbayd̲j̲ān, and D̲j̲ibāl, during the second half of the 6th/12th century and ¶ the early decades of the 7th/13th. Down to the death in battle in 590/1194 of Ṭog̲h̲ri̊l b. Arslan, last of the Great Sald̲j̲ūḳs of Iraq and Persia, the Ildeñizids ruled as theoretical subordinates of the Sultans, acknowledging this dependence on their coins almost down to the end of the Sald̲j̲ūḳs. Thereafter, they were in effec…

, the name of a district, and of its mediaeval urban centre, in the western part of the Persian province of Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān. The district comprises ¶ a fertile plain near the northwestern corner of Lake Urmiya, bounded on the west by the Harāwīl mountain range with the pass of Ḵh̲ānasūr (2,408 m/7,900 feet) leading into Turkey, and on the south by the Kūh-i Awg̲h̲ān. The modern town of Salmās, S̲h̲ābūr or Dīlmān(lat. 38° 13′ N., long. 44° 50′ E.), lies 48 km/30 miles to the south-south-west of Ḵh̲ōy [see khoi ] on the Zala Čay river. The region of Salmās has be…

, a town in eastern Transcaucasia on the left bank of the middle course of the Araxes or Aras River, lying in lat. 38°54′ N. and long. 46° 01′ E. and at an altitude of 948 m/2,930 ft. The Turco-Persian name “army town” implies a probable foundation during the period of the Mongol ¶ invasions or of the ensuing Il-K̲h̲ānids, especially as the latter made Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān the centre of their power. Certainly, Ḥamd Allāh Mustawfī (mid-8th/14th century) describes it as a provincial town, one of the five making up the tūmān of Nak̲h̲čiwān [ q.v.], watered by a stream coming down from Mount Ḳub…

, Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Isḥāḳ al-Ṭūsī , the celebrated minister of the Sald̲j̲ūḳid sultans Alp Arslān [ q.v.] and Maliks̲h̲āh [ q.v.]. According to most authorities, he was born on Friday 21 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḳaʿda 408/10 April 1018, though the 6th/12th century Taʾrīk̲h̲-i Bayhaḳ of Ibn Funduḳ al-Bayhaḳī [ q.v.], which alone supplies us with detailed information about his family, places his birth in 410/1019-20. His birth-place was Rādkān, a village in the neighbourhood of Ṭūs, of which his father was revenue agent on behalf of the G̲h̲aznawīd gov…

, a town in western Anatolia, classical Opsicum. It lies on the margin of a fertile plain, a few miles south of the upper course of the Gediz river and to the north of the main Manisa-Uşak road, in lat. 38°33′ north and long. 28°40′ east and at an altitude of 2,140 feet/652 m. it is in a volcanic area (classical Katakekaumene or Combusta), with the extinct volcano Karadevlit north-east of the town; hence many of the houses are built from dark basalt. There are numerous marble remains from classical times, but the citadel, apparently late mediaeval, is ruinous. Ḳūla came …

, a district in K̲h̲urāsān, original Persian form Tōs (also thus in the later 8th century Armenian geography, see Markwart-Messina, A catalogue of the provincial capitals of Ērānshahr , Rome 1931, 11, 47), which played a notable part in the medieval Islamic period of Persia’s Islamic history. ¶ 1. History. In early Islamic times, Ṭūs was the name of a district containing several towns. The town of Nawḳān flourished down to the end of the 3rd/9th century. The form Nawḳān < Nōḳan is confirmed by the present name of the Mas̲h̲had quarter Nawg̲h̲ān (where the diphthong aw corresponds to the old wāw…

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…

al-Ḏj̲uras̲h̲ī , ʿAbbāsid governor. He was the brother of the famous Ḵh̲ayzurān [ q.v.], the Yemeni girl of slave origin who married the caliph al-Mahdī and was mother of the two successive caliphs al-Hādī and al-Ras̲h̲īd. Al-G̲h̲iṭrīf is also given the nisba of “al-Kindi” in the biography of him by Gardīzī (probably stemming from al-Sallāmī’s lost Taʾrīk̲h̲ Wulāt Ḵh̲urāsān ) and by al-Samʿānī, and may accordingly have been a mawlā of the great South Arabian tribe of Kinda [ q.v.] ( Zayn al-ak̲h̲bār , ed. ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Ḥabībī, Tehran 1347/1968, 96, 129-30)…

, a former native state of the British Indian empire. It lies in the south-east of Balūčistān, along the coast to the west of Karachi, between lats. 24° 54′ and 26° 39′ N. and longs, 64° 7′ and 67° 29′ E. It is bounded on the west by Makrān [ q.v.] (of which western Las Bēla forms indeed a part), on the north by the Jhalāwān district of the former Kalāt native state [see kilāt ] and on the east by the former province of Sind; its area, both as a former native state and as a modern District of Pakistan (see below) is 6,441 sq. miles. 1. Geography. The central part of the state is a flat, arid plain ( las …

“the land of the Mongols”, the name used from the time of the Mongols (13th century) onwards to designate the steppe, plateau and mountain region of Inner Asia lying to the north of Transoxania or Mā warāʾ al-nahr [ q.v.] and the Syr Darya, hence including inter alia the region of Semirečiye, Turkish Yeti-su “the land of seven rivers”, which comprised the basins of the Ili and Ču rivers [ q.vv.]; this part of Mog̲h̲olistān corresponds in large measure with the modern Kazakh SSR. But the region also extended eastwards across the Tien Shan and Ala Tau ranges into th…

, the Arabic name for Talas , a river of Central Asia and a town of pre-Islamic and early Islamic times on its bank. The exact site is unknown, but was probably near the later Awliyā ¶ Atā/Aulie Ata, modern Dzhambul. This last is now just within the Kazakhstan Republic, but the old name Talas has been revived for a modern settlement some distance to the east, on the left bank of the Talas River and just within Kirghizia. The original Talas certainly lay in the river valley, between two mountain ranges which run westwards and end in the Aḳ Ḳum desert. The valley carried an important trade route e…

, S̲h̲ahrizūr (in S̲h̲araf K̲h̲ān Bidlīsī’s S̲h̲araf-nāma , S̲h̲ahra-zūl), a district in western Kurdistān lying to the west of the Awrāmān mountain chain, essentially a fertile plain some 58 × 40 km/36 × 25 miles in area, watered by the tributaries of the Tānd̲j̲arō river, which flows into the Sīrwān and eventually to the Diyālā and Tigris. In the wide sense, S̲h̲ahrazūr denoted in Ottoman times the eyālet or province of Kirkūk, a source of considerable confusion in geographical terminology. The district is closely associated with the Ahl-i Ḥaḳḳ [ q.v.], and the initiates of the sec…