, the river Nile. The Nile is one of the large rivers (length ca. 6,648 km./4,132 miles) which from the beginning have belonged to the territory of Islam, and the valleys and deltas of which have favoured the development of an autonomous cultural centre in Islamic civilisation. In the case of the Nile, this centre has influenced at different times the cultural and political events in the Islamic world. Thus the Nile has, during the Islamic period, continued to play the same part as it did during the centuries that preceded the coming of Islam. The name al-Nīl or, very often, Nīl Miṣr, goe…

is the arabicised form of the Persian name Kūhistān meaning a mountainous country (derived from kūh , “mountain” with the sufix -istān ) and corresponds to the Arabic designation al-D̲j̲ibāl. As the Iranian plateau is very mountainous, we find many more or less extensive areas in it to which the name Ḳūhistān has been given, as Yāḳūt has already remarked (iv, 204). Many of these names have disappeared in course of time. Thus Ḳazwīnī (ed. Wüstenfeld, 228) says that the term Ḳūhistān is used for Media, which other geographers always call al-D̲j̲ibāl. In the S̲h̲āh-nāma …

, a town in central Syria in the district of Orontes (Nahr al-ʿĀṣī), about 25 miles south-east of Ḥamāt and 35 miles north-east of Ḥimṣ (for the town’s exact situation, see Kiepert’s map in M. von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum Persischen Golf , Berlin 1899, i. 124 ff., and ii, 401; National Geographic Atlas of the World , 5th ed., Washington D.C. 1981, 178-9). Salamiyya lies in a fertile plain 1,500 feet above sea level, south of the D̲j̲abal al-Aʿlā and on the margin of the Syrian steppe. The older and more correct pronunciation…

, S̲h̲ūs̲h̲tar , Arabie form Tustar , a town of southwestern Persia in the mediaeval Islamic province of Ahwāz [ q.v.] and the modern one ( ustān ) of K̲h̲ūzistān (lat. 32° 03’ N., long. 48° 51’ E.). It stands on a cliff to the west of which runs the river Kārūn [ q.v.], the middle course of which begins a few miles north of the town. This position gives the town considerable commercial and strategic importance and has made possible the construction of various waterworks for which the town has long been famous. The main features of these construct…

, also written Sifri Ḥiṣār , i.e. strong fortress (see Aḥmed Wefīḳ, Lehd̲j̲e-yi ʿOt̲h̲mānī , 459), the early Turkish and Ottoman name of two small towns in northwestern and western Anatolia respectively. 1. The more important one is the modern Turkish Sivrihisar, in the modern il or province of Eskişehir. It lies on the Eskişehir-Ankara road roughly equidistant from each, south of the course of the Porsuk river and north of the upper course of the Saḳarya [ q.v.] (lat. 39° 29′ N., long. 31° 32′ E., altitude 1,050 m/3,440 feet). …

(a.), a word which is originally an abstract noun meaning “power, authority”, but which by the 4th/10th century often passes to the meaning “holder of power, authority”. It could then be used for provincial and even quite petty rulers who had assumed de facto power alongside the caliph, but in the 5th/11th century was especially used by the dominant power in the central lands of the former caliphate, the Great Sald̲j̲ūḳs [see sald̲j̲ūḳids. II, III.l], who initially overshadowed the ʿAbbāsids of Bag̲h̲dād. In the Perso-Turkish and Indo-Muslim worlds especially, the feminine form sulṭāna…

, the name of a Turkish dynasty, ultimately of Og̲h̲uz origin [see g̲h̲uzz ], whose name appears in European sources as ottomans (Eng.), ottomanes (Fr.), osmanen (Ger.), etc. I. political and dynastic history 1. General survey and chronology of the dynasty The Ottoman empire was the territorially most extensive and most enduring Islamic state since the break-up of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate and the greatest one to be founded by Turkish-speaking peoples. It arose in the Islamic world after the devastations over much of the eastern and central lands of the Dār al-Islām …