Encyclopedia of Islam

copresident of the World Conference of Religion for Peace in 1999 and was a delegate to the United Nations Millennium Peace Summ ...

permitted and what is forbidden originates from God. According to the Quran, for example, among the things God forbids people to ...

arrival of Muslim armies in the seventh century. Khusrau I (r. 531—579 c.e.) reportedly had as many as 12,000 women in his harem ...

nations of the West and in the palaces of a handful of autocratic Muslim kings and sUlta ns. See also cinema; hijab; hoUses; mUg ...

Islam’s Greatest Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2005); al-Tabari, The Early Abbasid Empire. Vol. Translated by John ...

Rulers and custodians of the Hijaz and its holy cities from 1201 until 1925, the Hashimites’ power base shifted to the newly for ...

revolutionary ideology of the Egyptian sayyid qUtb (d. 1966) and helped organize Muslim students against the growing influence o ...

khaWariJ and the Shia. Both groups diverged from what became the Sunni orthodox view of ruler- ship. In fact, it was the diverge ...

of demonstrating that their nations were modern and progressive. However, postcolonial nationalist and religious movements have ...

caused them to neglect widows, orphans, and the poor. Some were outraged by the prediction that those who did not believe in all ...

recently, leaders of radical Islamic movements have called upon their followers to abandon jahil- iyya society, the society of i ...

ied Indian languages, sciences, customs, and reli- gions. His record is the first textual evidence that the ballyhooed antipathy ...

politically marginalized, despite being about 13 percent of the population, or about 130,000,000 people (the third-largest Musli ...

scholars wrote that the duty applied only within the Islamic community; women and disabled Muslim men were exempt, and individua ...

side government surveillance and arrests. Some observers have remarked that it resembles the Communist Party in organization mor ...

Since the end of the country’s civil war in 1989, Hizbullah has participated in elections, assuming a prominent position in Leba ...

friends, and performance of charitable acts. Aside from these celebrations, every Friday in the year is considered to be an espe ...

Islam is the primacy their adherents give to holy books, scriptures believed to have been revealed or inspired by the one God. J ...

prayers. In Christianity, Bible readings are central to Protestant life and worship, and the Roman Catholic Mass includes a Litu ...

Just as Christians had to define their beliefs in relation to the Torah (the Old Testament), Mus- lims had to do so in relation ...