, the name of two brothers, Abu ’l-Ḥasan Aḥmad and Abū Isḥāḳ (Abū Yusr) Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Mudabbir, who played an important part as high officials, courtiers and men of letters as well as poets at Sāmarrā and in Egypt and Syria during the middle of the 3rd/9th century. The family seems to have been of Persian origin; it is not mentioned which of the two brothers was the elder. (1) Abu ’l-Ḥasan (d. 270/883 or 271/884) directed the dīwān al-diays̲h̲ in the reign of the caliph al-Wāt̲h̲iḳ (227/842-232/847); during the first years of al-M…

[see ibn al-mudabbir ].

, Aḥmad b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm , Ṭūlūnid historian. His father Yūsuf was a fosterbrother of the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim and an administrative assistant to Ibrāhīm b. al-Mahdī. As such, Yūsuf moved in the centre of intellectual life in Bag̲h̲dād and Sāmarrā and counted among his acquaintances many littérateurs and physicians. After the death of Ibn al-Mahdī in 224/839 (and, presumably, in consequence of it), he left Sāmarrā for Damascus and, it seems, moved from there to Egypt where he th…

, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Masarra al-D̲j̲abalī , Andalusian philosopher and mystic, born at Cordova in 269/883 and died in 319/931 in a hermitage on the Sierra near this town, to which he had retired long before. He lived during a period in which Muslim Spain suffered a veritable inquisition conducted by the Mālikī fuḳahāʾ . His father, ʿAbd Allāh, who may have been of Christian descent, was a Muʿtazilī and in order to teach his doctrines had to take many precautions. The young Muḥammad became his pupil and received from him a…

, Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. al-ʿAbbās b. D̲j̲urayd̲j̲ (or Ḏj̲urd̲j̲is or Ḏj̲urd̲j̲īs). poet of the 3rd/9th century, was born at Bag̲h̲dād on 2 Rad̲j̲ab 221/21 June 836 and died there in 283/896 (some sources give the date of his death as 276/889 or 284/897). His father, al-ʿAbbās, a Byzantine freedman and a client of ʿUbayd Allāh b. ʿĪsā b. D̲j̲aʿfar, was probably the first member of the family to embrace Islam. His mother Ḥasana, the daughter of ʿAbd Allāh al-Sid̲j̲zī, was of Persian origin. Little is known of his studies. It is known, however, that he went to a school attended by …

, Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad , Abu ’l-Yusr al-Ḳayrawānī al-Riyāḍī “the mathematician” (223-298/838-911), adīb and author of rasāʾil . He was born in Bag̲h̲dād, where he pursued his studies before making his way to Ifrīḳiya in 261/874 during the reign of the Ag̲h̲labid amīr Ibrāhīm b. Aḥmad al-Ag̲h̲lab (261-90/874-902). Unfortunately, little is known concerning the life in Bag̲h̲dād of this prolific letter writer and poet. Besides the valuable information regarding him supplied by Ibn al-Abbār in his Takmila (i, article 454, p. 174), stating that al-S̲h̲ay…

, aḥmad b. muḥammad b. s̲h̲urāʿa al-ḳaysī al-bakrī , minor poet of Baṣra who, during the course of the 3rd/9th century, took part in the social and intellectual life of his native town, and hardly left it, it seems, except to make the Pilgrimage or to visit places very close at hand. For the rest, his life is poorly documented. It seems unlikely that he was able, as Ibn al-Muʿtazz asserts ( Ṭabaḳāt , 177-8), to praise al-Mahdī (158-69/775-85) during the latter’s lifetime, to have reached an advanced age in al-Maʾmūn’s time and to die in the cali…

, founder of the Ṭūlūnid [ q.v.] dynasty, the first Muslim governor of Egypt to annex Syria. Vassal in name only of the ʿAbbāsid caliph, he is a typical example of the Turkish slaves who from the time of Hārūn al-Ras̲h̲īd were enlisted in the private service of the caliph and the principal officers of state, and whose ambition and spirit of intrigue and independance were soon to make them the real masters of Islam. Aḥmad’s father Ṭūlūn is said to have been included in the tribute sent by the governor …

, governing family of Egypt from 254/868 to 292/905, the date of the brief restoration of direct ʿAbbāsid rule over the province. A history of the family centres on the careers of its first two members, Aḥmad b. Ṭūlūn [ q.v.] and his son, K̲h̲umārawayh [ q.v.], who succeeded his father in 270/884. Ibn Ṭūlūn was sent as resident governor by Bāyakbāk (d. 256/870), himself appointed over Egypt by the caliph al-Muʿtazz in 254/868 (al-Yaʿḳūbī, Taʾrīk̲h̲ , ii, 615). Ibn Ṭūlūn and Bāyakbāk were both members of the largely Central Asian Turkish guard forme…

, Muḥammad Farīd , Syrian journalist, scholar and man of letters, was born in Damascus in 1876, of a father of Kurdish origin and a Čerkes mother. From an early age, he showed an interest in nature and in books, and it was reading which, combined with his innate curiosity and gifts of observation, made the greatest contribution to his intellectual development. Already bilingual in Turkish and Arabic, he learnt French from the Lazarist Fathers of Damascus, and this enable him t…

, the Arabic term for the Copts or native Christians of Egypt. The term is a derivative of the Greek Aigyptos , a phonetic corruption of the Ancient Egyptian Ha-Ka-Ptah , i.e. the house or temple of the god Ptah, signifying Memphis. The Greeks used the word for Egypt and the Nile, hence the word “Coptic” is originally the equivalent of Egyptian. Curtailment of both prefix and suffix from the Greek term gives us Gypṭ > Arabic rendering Ḳibṭ . According to Semitic sources, however, this term is derived from Kuftaim, son of Mizraim, a grandchild of Noah …

, toll, customs duty, is a loanword in Arabic and goes back to the Aramaic maksā , cf. Hebrew mekes and Assyr. miksu ; from it is formed a verb m-k-s I, II, III and makkās , the collector of customs. According to the Arabic tradition preserved in Ibn Sīda, even in the D̲j̲āhiliyya there were marketdues called maks , so that the word must have entered Arabic very early. It is found in Arabic papyri towards the end of the 1st century A.H. C. H. Becker dealt with the history of the maks, especially in Egypt, and we follow him here. The old law books use maks in the sense of ʿus̲h̲r , the…

, an Arabic word meaning lucidity, distinetness; the means by which clearness is achieved, explanation; hence, clarity of speech or expression, and the faculty by which clarity is attained. In technical language bayān develops from a (near-) synonym of balāg̲h̲a , eloquence, to the designation of a particular aspect of it which, within the ʿilm al-balāg̲h̲a is dealt with by the ʿilm al-bayān . Common usage, however, continues to emply bayān in a wider variety of meanings (cf. also colourless phrases like bāb bayān or dar bayān-i , where nothing more than fī or dar i…

(a.), an Arabic term attested at a very early stage, in the ancient inscriptions of Arabia, with the meaning of message or of mission (G. Lankester Harding, An index and concordance of pre-Islamic names and inscriptions, Toronto 1971, 277). In fact, risāla has many meanings; it has signified message, missive, letter, epistle and monograph; from the 5th/11th century onwards it could also be a synonym of maḳāma (see below, section on Risāla and maḳāma). The synonyms recorded are kitāb [ q.v.], k̲h̲iṭāb (for Ps.-Ibn al-Mudabbir in the 3rd/9th century, risāla and k̲h̲iṭāb were synonyms, Ṣafw…

, one of the words most generally used to denote a tax, applied in particular to the whole category of taxes which in practice were added to the basic taxes of canonical theory. These latter ( zakāt or ʿus̲h̲r , d̲j̲izya and k̲h̲arād̲j̲ , etc.) and their yield in the “classical” period, have been covered in a general survey in an earlier article, Bayt al-māl , and a detailed description of the methodes of assessment and collection will be given under their respective titles, in particular under k̲h̲arād̲j̲; along with k̲h̲arād̲j̲ and zakāt will be included associated taxes and payments…

(a.), poetry. 1. In Arabic. (a) The pre-modern period. It is the supreme ornament of Arab culture and its most authentically representative form of discourse. The ideas articulated by poetry and the emotional resonances which it conveys earn it, even in the present day, where numerous new literary forms are in competition with it, the approval of scholars and the populace alike. Despite the phonetic resemblance, s̲h̲iʿr is totally unconnected with the Hebrew s̲h̲īr , the ʿayn is a “hard” consonant which persists in the roots common to the two langu…

, Egypt A. The eponym of Egypt B. The early Islamic settlements developing out of the armed camps and the metropolises of the conquered provinces C. The land of Egypt: the name in early Islamic times 1. Miṣr as the capital of Egypt: the name in early Islamic times 2. The historical development of the capital of Egypt i. The first three centuries, [see al-fusṭāṭ ] ii. The Nile banks, the island of Rawḍa and the adjacent settlement of D̲j̲īza (Gīza) iii. The Fāṭimid city, Miṣr al-Ḳāhira, and the development of Cairo till the end of the 18t…

, in Arabic mineralogy and pharmacology considered to be one of the at least six kinds of bawraḳ [ q.v.]. It is the νίτρον/ nitrum of the ancients, but indicates not our saltpetre but a compound of sodium carbonate (NaCO 3) and sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO 3) with several impurities. In reverse bawraḳ, because of the vagueness of the term (see Dietlinde Goltz, Studien zur Geschichte der Mineralnamen in Pharmazie , Chemie und Medizin von den Anfängen bis Paracelsus , Wiesbaden 1972, 248-50), is considered as a kind of naṭrūn (Maimonides, S̲h̲arḥ asmāʾ al-ʿuḳḳār , ed. M…

, the first ruler of the Indo-Muslim state which arose after the death of the G̲h̲ūrid S̲h̲ihāb al-Dīn (Muʿizz al-Dīn) Muḥammad b. Sām in 1206 and was subsequently to be based at Dihlī. Brought as a slave from Turkestan first to Nīs̲h̲āpūr and then to G̲h̲azna, he was purchased by Muḥammad, then engaged in the reduction of the independent Hindu principalities in northern India, and rose to be amīr- i āk̲h̲ūr (master of the horse) and muḳṭaʿ of Kohŕām (now Ghurām in Patiāla) and Sāmāna. The sources for this period, composed either under Aybak’s hege…

ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. al-Ḥusayn , G̲h̲ūrid ruler—poet, notorious for his burning of G̲h̲azna in 546/1151. The cause of the violence between the G̲h̲ūrids and Bahrām S̲h̲āh of G̲h̲azna [ q.v.] would appear to have been an attempt by Ḳuṭb al-Dīn Muḥammad, (eldest brother of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn) to seize G̲h̲azna through an intrigue with some of its inhabitants. Bahrām S̲h̲āh had him poisoned; an attempt by another brother, Sayf al-Dīn Sūrī, to avenge his brother ended, after the temporary occupation of G̲h̲azna by the G̲h̲ūrid force…