Encyclopedia of Islam

literature, medieval Persian and Urdu love poetry and narratives, and, according to some scholars, medieval European romance. Se ...

nents were British colonies, with Malaysia obtain- ing its independence in 1957. Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore obtained their in ...

overwhelmingly Chinese. Most of the Indians are Hindus from southern india. Christianity has made an impact primarily among the ...

as “a person who professes the religion of Islam.” There are few obstacles to anyone who wishes to convert from Buddhism or Chri ...

exchanged the surname “Little,” perceived as a “slave name,” for the symbolic “X” to denote his lost African heritage. Soon he b ...

Further reading: Yasin Dutton, The Origins of Islamic Law: The Quran, the Muwatta and Madinan Amal (Lon- don: Routledge Curzon, ...

Mansour H. Mansour, The Maliki School of Law: Spread and Domination in North and West Africa 8th to 14th Cen- turies c.e. (Bethe ...

Manat See goddess. Mappila See india. maqam (Arabic: place, station) Maqam has several meanings in Islamic religious contexts. I ...

from outward attack or persecution by unbeliev- ers. (2) The martyr can be one of the dissenting minority of the Shia, whose wat ...

of paradise.” Variants of this “bird” tradition state that the martyrs’ souls are “like birds with God,” “turned into green bird ...

and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princ- eton University Press, 2006). Mary (Arabic: Maryam) (late first centu ...

Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Heroine of the Qur’an and the Black Madonna.” In Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of ...

Further reading: Ibn al-Nadim, The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture. Translated by Bayard Dodge (Ne ...

rule in Hyderabad and other parts of India led him to call for an end to British colonial rule, removal of indigenous cultural i ...

his call for all Muslims to join together to form a single umma (community) of believers modeled after that of Muhammad and his ...

gifts, processions, animal sacrifice, circumcising boys, Quran recitation, all-night Sufi dhikr ses- sions, devotional songs, fe ...

Mina is the plain of Arafat, which has a hillock called the Mount of Mercy and two mosques— Namira and Muzdalifa. The cave nearb ...

also required to follow strict rules to maintain their bodily and spiritual purity, which heighten their awareness that they are ...

and seized the Kaaba’s black stone. Mecca’s dis- tance from the centers of political power provided the Sharifs, a local aristoc ...

1964); Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Suraiya Faroqhi, ...