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Sayyid Muḥsin al-Amīn (1867–1952) was a renowned Imāmī Shīʿī scholar and reformer. Born in Shaqrāʾ in the Jabal ʿĀmil region of present-day south Lebanon, he went to study in Najaf in 1891. In 1901 he became the spiritual leader of the Shīʿī community in Damascus, where he died some fifty years later. From his very beginnings as an author and religious teacher, al-Amīn distinguished himself as a staunch apologist for the basic tenets of Shīʿism, while at the same time calling for a rapprochement between Sunnī and Shīʿī Islam. Some of his works have become classics of modern Shīʿī apologetics. As early as the years leading up to World War I, this dual objective brought him into conflict with Sunnī Salafī writers such as Rashīd Riḍā. This confrontation developed into enmity in the mid-1920s, when many of these writers became partisans of the Wahhābiyya and Saudi Arabia (Brunner, 90–2; Mervin and al-Amīn, 184–6). During this period al-Amīn began …

The modern history of Medina, the second, after Mecca, of the holiest cities of Islam, is marked by the end of Ottoman rule, in 1919, a few years of Hashemite control, and the seizure of power by the Āl Suʿūd dynasty in December 1925. Following the Arab Revolt staged by the Hashemite amīrs of Mecca in June 1916, the Ottoman government made considerable efforts to maintain its rule over Medina. Under the command of general Fahreddin (Fakhr al-Dīn) Paşa, the Ottomans successfully defended Medina until the armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) and, through the insubordination of Fahreddin, continued their control even up until 9–10 January 1919 (Strohmeier, Fakhri; Badr, 41–83). During the siege by Hashemite forces, which began in November 1916 and ended 9–10 January 1919, the population of the city was forced to endure extreme hardship. Furthermore, the Grand Mosque of Medina, widely known as the Prophet’s Mosque, and other institutions, such as libraries, suffered grievous losses. From May 1917 onwards, Fahreddin organised the evacuation from Medina to Istanbul of relics (including many related to the prophet Muḥammad and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs) as well as of precious manuscripts; they have since remained in Istanbul, kept in the Topkapı Sarayı (Ende, Medina, 144–6; Yamānī and Tāshkandī, 1:33–68. A considerable number of similar relics, such as the mantle of the Prophet and some of his hairs, had been brought to Istanbul much earlier, for example, from Cairo after the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and the fall of the Mamlūks in 923/1517.) After the war, the city’s pilgrimage industry suffered from the fact that th…

Anwar al-Jundī (1917–2002) was an Egyptian journalist and literary critic known for his bio-bibliographical reference works and monographs on individual Arab Muslim writers as well as his polemical works against Western cultural influence in the Arab World in general and secularism in particular. Born in the town of Dayrūṭ, al-Jundī first worked as a bank clerk, but managed to develop a keen interest in literary studies outside of work. His early articles appeared in the Egyptian journal Apollo, a short-lived (1932–4) but influential avant-guard literary…

Muḥammad Jawād al-Balāghī (d. 1933) was an Iraqi Imāmī Shīʿī scholar, religious writer, polemicist, and poet. Born in Najaf in 1865–6 to a prominent family of scholars and littérateurs, he was educated first in his hometown, then, from 1888–9 until 1894–5, in al-Kāẓimiyya, afterwards again in Najaf, and then (1908–18) in Sāmarrāʾ. Soon after a second stay in al-Kāẓimiyya, during which he participated in the revolt of 1920, he returned to Najaf, where he led an ascetic life, devoting his time to te…

Baqīʿ al-Gharqad is the principal cemetery of Medina, the oldest and historically most important Islamic graveyard. The word baqīʿ originally denoted a area covered with trees and scrub, and gharqad is the box-thorn (genus Lycium). Though there are, in the cemetery of al-Maʿlā, in Mecca, tombs (such as that of Khadīja) ascribed to Muslims who died before the …