A. Masri, Islamic Concern for Animals (Petersfield, U.K.:
Athene Trust, 1987).
Ansar (Arabic: helpers)
The Ansar were early converts to islam from medina
who joined in an alliance with mUhammad and the
emigrants from mecca in 622. They were members
of the Arab Khazraj and Aws tribes, the two domi-
nant tribes in Medina at that time, and they served
as hosts for the Emigrants. The Ansar participated
in the battles against Muhammad’s enemies and in
the early wars of conquest after his death in 632.
Together with other groups that participated in the
conquest, they settled in the new garrison towns of
Kufa in iraq and Fustat (cairo) in egypt. They also
ranked highly on the registries for receiving income
from newly conquered territories in the Middle
East. As rivals to the qUraysh tribe of Mecca, they
supported the candidacy of ali ibn abi talib (d.
661) for the caliphate, and in the eighth century,
they allied with the Abbasids in their revolt against
the Umayyad caliphate. As a tribe, they eventu-
ally blended in with other members of the Muslim
community, but the name continues to be used for
mosques and contemporary Muslim organizations.
In Sudan, the Ansar is a significant Islamic
movement named after the helpers of the Suda-
nese mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah
(d. 1885), who ruled the country for a short time
in the 1880s. The Mahdis’ heirs reorganized the
group into a puritanical religious movement in
the early 20th century, and it has played a major
role in modern Sudanese politics to the present
day. The Ansar name was also used independently
by radical Islamist guerrilla organizations in iraq,
pakistan, and lebanon in the 1990s and 2000s.
See also umma.
Further reading: Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the
Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the
Sixth to the Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1986);
W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1956).
anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is a topic in classical Islamic
theology. It is concerned with the question as to
whether God resembles human beings in his fea-
tures (attributes), actions, and emotions. Is God
completely unlike his creation and distant from
it, or not? The issue was raised in debates about
statements in the qUran and hadith as well as in
efforts made by early Muslims to distinguish their
religious beliefs from non-Islamic ones, especially
those of the ancient Near Eastern cultures and the
Greeks, who commonly portrayed their gods and
goddesses in human form, and Christians, who
held that JesUs was God in the flesh. Political con-
flicts within the Muslim community in the eighth
century may also have intensified the debate.
Muslims who were called anthropomor-
phists (people who believed that God resembled
humans) looked to passages in the Quran that say,
for example, “Grace is in God’s hand” (Q 3:73)
and “His throne encompasses the heavens and
earth” (Q 2:255). They argued that God therefore
must have a real hand and that he had a body that
could be seated on a throne. The hadith contain
even stronger anthropomorphisms, such as the
one based on the Bible, which says that God cre-
ated adam “in his image.” Their opponents, how-
ever, argued that such statements could not be
taken literally, but that they were figures of speech
intended to help ordinary humans grasp abstract
theological concepts. To support their views,
the opponents of anthropomorphism quoted the
Quran verse that says of God “nothing is like him”
(Q 42:11), implying that God lacks resemblance
to his creation, including humans.
Anthropomorphic understandings of God
were based partly on popular religious piety in
the eighth and ninth centuries, and they were
articulated by Sunni scholars who held to the lit-
eral reading of the Quran and hadith, as well as by
followers of extremist Shii doctrines. The extreme
rationalist view of God that denied any real
resemblance between God and his creation was
articulated by the mUtazili school and supportedanthropomorphism 45 J