, 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…

, Yāfa , conventionally Jaffa, older Joppa, a port on the Palestinian seaboard, in pre-modern times the port of entry for Jerusalem, since 1950 part of the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo in the State of Israel (lat. 32° 05′ N., long. 34° 46′ E.). Situated on a 30 m/100 feet-high promontory on the otherwise straight coastline of central Palestine, Jaffa is a very ancient town. Thutmosis III’s forces seized the Canaanite town of ϒ-pw in the 15th century B.C. and it became a provincial capital during the Egyptian New Kingdom; since the 1950s, archaeological excavations h…

(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…

¶ , “the Pure Soul”, ʿAlid rebel, together with his full brother Ibrāhīm [ q.v.] against the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr at Medina in 145/762-3. He and Ibrāhīm had, according to al-Wāḳidī, been brought up as future rulers, and Muḥammad was called al-Mahdī by his father. As early, as the reign of the Umayyad caliph His̲h̲ām, the two sectarians al-Mug̲h̲īra b. Saʿīd al-ʿId̲j̲lī and Bayān b. Samʿān [ q.v.], who did not recognise Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Bāḳir [ q.v.], endeavoured to make propaganda for him. When signs of the imminent collapse of Umayyad rule became apparent after …

, 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 …

, the Greek Tripolis, called “of Syria” in the Arabic sources to distinguish it from Ṭarābulus al-G̲h̲arb [ q.v.] “of the West”, Tripoli in Libya, an historic town of the Mediterranean coast of the Levant, to the north of D̲j̲ubayl and Batrūn [ q.vv.]. It lies partly on and partly beside a hill at the exit of a deep ravine through which flows a river, the Nahr Ḳadīs̲h̲a (Arabic, Abū ʿAlī). West of it stretches a very fertile plain covered with woods, which terminate in a peninsula on which lies the port of al-Mīnā. The harbour is protect…

, 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…

, the Prophet of Islam. 1. The Prophet’s life and career. 2. The Prophet in popular Muslim piety. 3. The Prophet’s image in Europe and the West. 1. The Prophet’s life and career. Belief that Muḥammad is the Messenger of God ( Muḥammadun rasūlu ’llāh ) is second only to belief in the Oneness of God ( lā ilāha illā ’llāh ) according to the s̲h̲ahāda [ q.v.], the quintessential Islamic creed. Muḥammad has a highly exalted role at the heart of Muslim faith. At the same time the Ḳurʾān and Islamic orthodoxy insist that he was fully human with no supernatural powers. That Muḥammad was one of the greate…