Encyclopedia of Islam

even be called a “wedding” or be understood as a milestone on the road to marriage. Uncircumcised converts to Islam may be requi ...

nected by trade routes that spanned mountains, deserts, river lands, and sometimes seas, forming complex spatial hierarchies, or ...

(12.5 million, 2005), Karachi (Pakistan) (11.8 million, 2005), Istanbul (Turkey) (9.8 million, 2005), and Tehran (Iran) (8.6 mil ...

account for the ongoing interdependence between the state and civil society. The institutions, associ- ations, organizations, ga ...

clitoridectomy See circumcision. coffee Coffee is one of the most widely consumed brewed beverages in the world today, especiall ...

home, Middle Eastern women prepare and serve coffee to guests and friends. Also, in almost any gathering of women, there are sev ...

economy. Ancient empires such as those of Greece and Rome engaged in colonial practices, and so did medieval ones, including the ...

Crown colony until it became a possession of the United States in 1898. It is difficult to overestimate how deeply Euro- pean co ...

turning to ijtihad (individual legal reasoning) for the interpretation of Islam’s legal requirements and prohibitions. Such deve ...

ally accompanied by speech bubbles and narrative text boxes. Comic books are expanded versions of comic strips published as a ma ...

traditional folk art, modern print publications, and commercial art. Islamic comics have several different kinds of themes. Some ...

see communism as being incompatible with their core Islamic values and teachings, such as their belief in God, performance of ob ...

Companions of the Prophet (Arabic: al-sahaba; ashab al-nabi) The Companions of the Prophet are the Muslims who joined with mUham ...

laws, and yet somehow remain “above” the law in acts of civil disobedience, amending or reforming the constitution, or in a cons ...

Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003); Russell Hardin, Liberalism, Constitutionalism and Democracy (Ox ...

ics at the same time the Anglo-Russian Conven- tion of 1907 was dividing Iran into respective spheres of British and Russian inf ...

Among scholars, debate has centered on the question of when conversion to Islam primarily took place, especially in the Islamica ...

century, such that by the 15th century the Coptic language had all but disappeared except for litur- gical purposes. In the medi ...

of its kind in any of the Muslim lands, and it was renowned for its great beauty. The mosque’s design recalled that of Umayyad m ...

profiling and hate crimes, a survey of mosques in the United States, and annual reports on the status of Muslim civil rights. CA ...