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Banu Musa

(Encyclopedia)Banu Musa bäno͞oˈ mo͞osäˈ [key], family of Arab mathematicians and astronomers of the 9th cent. a.d. The name means “sons of Musa” and refers to the three brothers, Muhammad, Ahmad, and al-H...

Muallaqat

(Encyclopedia)Muallaqat mo͞oälˌäkätˈ [key], Pre-Islamic Arabic anthology compiled by the scholar Hammad al Rawiya (d. c.775). comprised of poems that were written in gold letters and hung on the walls of the ...

Sufism

(Encyclopedia)Sufism so͞oˈfĭzəm [key], an umbrella term for the ascetic and mystical movements within Islam. While Sufism is said to have incorporated elements of Christian monasticism, gnosticism, and Indian m...

Adelard of Bath

(Encyclopedia)Adelard of Bath ădˈəlärd [key], fl. 12th cent., English scholastic philosopher, celebrated for his study of Arabic learning. He translated Euclid from Arabic into Latin. His major works were Perdi...

Abd al-Malik

(Encyclopedia)Abd al-Malik äbˌdo͝ol-mälĭkˈ [key], c.646–705, 5th Umayyad caliph (685–705); son of Marwan I. At his accession, Islam was torn by dissension and threatened by the Byzantine Empire. With the ...

Mufaddaliyat

(Encyclopedia)Mufaddaliyat mō– [key], great Arabic anthology compiled by the celebrated philologist Al Mufaddal ad-Dabbi (d. c.775). It contains 126 poems, some complete odes, others fragmentary. They are all of...

Hamasa

(Encyclopedia)Hamasa hämäˈsä, həmäˈsə [key] [Arab.,=valor], one of the great anthologies of Arabic literature. It was gathered together in the 9th cent. by Abu Tammam when he was snowbound in Hamadan, where...

Arabs

(Encyclopedia)Arabs, name originally applied to the Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula. It now refers to those persons whose primary language is Arabic. They constitute most of the population of Algeria, Bahr...

Turkish language

(Encyclopedia)Turkish language, member of the Turkic subdivision of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). Turkish is the official language of Turkey and one ...

Zen Buddhism

(Encyclopedia)Zen Buddhism, Buddhist sect of China and Japan. The name of the sect (Chin. Ch'an, Jap. Zen) derives from the Sanskrit dhyana [meditation]. In China the school early became known for making its centra...