, ‘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…