, one of the common Arabic terms (with d̲j̲und and ʿaskar ) for the army. ¶ i. — Classical . Except possibly in the Yaman, pre-Islamic Arabia, although living under permanent conditions of minor warfare, knew no armies in the proper meaning of the term apart from those of foreign occupation. Conflicts between tribes brought into action virtually all able-bodied men, but without any military organization, and combats were very often settled by individual feats of arms. The embryo of an army may be said to have appeared with Islam in the expeditions led or prepared by the Prophet, although the d̲…

, ‘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…