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  • Absolutely Fabulous (British television show)
    British television situation comedy that was broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in five seasons (1992, 1994, 1995, 2001, 2003), along with several specials, and that built up a loyal following among both its British fans and American cable viewers, who watched the show’s rebroadcasts....
  • absolution (Christianity)
    in the Christian religion, a pronouncement of remission (forgiveness) of sins to the penitent. In Roman Catholicism, penance is a sacrament and the power to absolve lies with the priest, who can grant release from the guilt of sin to the sinner who is truly contrite, confesses his sin, and promises to perform satisfaction...
  • absolutism (political system)
    the political doctrine and practice of unlimited, centralized authority and absolute sovereignty, as vested especially in a monarch or dictator. The essence of an absolutist system is that the ruling power is not subject to regularized challenge or check by any other agency, be it judicial, legislative, religious, economic, or electoral. Kin...
  • absorber layer (engineering)
    The three energy-conversion layers below the antireflection layer are the top junction layer, the absorber layer, which constitutes the core of the device, and the back junction layer. Two additional electrical contact layers are needed to carry the electric current out to an external load and back into the cell, thus completing an electric circuit. The electrical contact layer on the face of......
  • absorbing process (mathematics)
    At another extreme are absorbing processes. An example is the Markov process describing Peter’s fortune during the game of gambler’s ruin. The process is absorbed whenever either Peter or Paul is ruined. Questions of interest involve the probability of being absorbed in one state rather than another and the distribution of the time until absorption occurs. Some additional examples of...
  • absorptiometry (chemistry)
    In the most often used spectral method, the electromagnetic radiation that is provided by the instrument is absorbed by the analyte, and the amount of the absorption is measured. Absorption occurs when a quantum of electromagnetic radiation, known as a photon, strikes a molecule and raises it to some excited (high-energy) state. The intensity (i.e., the energy, in the form of......
  • absorption (physiology)
    ...most widely accepted possible mechanisms for stimulation of gustatory receptors are the following: (1) chemical reactions at the cell surface; (2) adsorption of molecules on the cell surface; (3) penetration of substances into the cell; (4) enzymatic reactions at the cell surface; and (5) protein bonding in the cell membrane....
  • absorption (physics)
    in wave motion, the transfer of the energy of a wave to matter as the wave passes through it. The energy of an acoustic, electromagnetic, or other wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude—i.e., the maximum displacement or movement of a point on the wave; and, as the wave passes through a substance, its amplitude steadily decreases. If there is only a sm...
  • absorption (chemistry)
    Adsorption refers to the collecting of molecules by the external surface or internal surface (walls of capillaries or crevices) of solids or by the surface of liquids. Absorption, with which it is often confused, refers to processes in which a substance penetrates into the actual interior of crystals, of blocks of amorphous solids, or of liquids. Sometimes the word sorption is used to indicate......
  • absorption coefficient (physics)
    ...a fractional amount that is proportional to the thickness of the layer. The change in energy as the wave passes through a layer is a constant of the material for a given wavelength and is called its absorption coefficient. ...
  • absorption costing (accounting)
    The methods of cost finding described in the preceding paragraphs are known as full, or absorption, costing methods, in that the overhead rates are intended to include provisions for all manufacturing costs. Both process and job-order costing methods can also be adapted to variable costing in which only variable manufacturing costs are included in product cost. Variable costs rise or fall in......
  • absorption dynamometer (instrument)
    Absorption dynamometers, on the other hand, produce the torque that they measure by creating a constant restraint to the turning of a shaft by either mechanical friction, fluid friction, or electromagnetic induction. A Prony brake (see figure) develops mechanical friction on the periphery of a rotating pulley by means of brake blocks that are squeezed against the wheel by tightening the bol...
  • absorption edge (physics)
    ...just required to remove an electron from a specific inner shell to form an ion. The sudden increase of the absorption coefficient as the wavelength is reduced past the shell energy is called an absorption edge; there is an absorption edge associated with each of the inner shells. They are due to the fact that an electron in a particular shell can be excited above the ionization energy of......
  • absorption line (spectroscopy)
    ...well above the ground level in energy. Only at high temperatures are sufficient numbers of atoms maintained in this state by collisions, radiations, and so forth to permit an appreciable number of absorptions to occur. At the low surface temperatures of a red dwarf star, few electrons populate the second level of hydrogen, and thus the hydrogen lines are dim. By contrast, at very high......
  • absorption nebula (astronomy)
    interstellar dust and gas concentrated sufficiently to produce conspicuous obscuring of the stars beyond (see nebula)....
  • absorption spectra (physics)
    ...an emission, or bright-line, spectrum. When light passes through a gas or cloud at a lower temperature than the light source, the gas absorbs at its identifying wavelengths, and a dark-line, or absorption, spectrum will be formed....
  • absorption spectroscopy (science)
    Absorption spectroscopy measures the loss of electromagnetic energy after it illuminates the sample under study. For example, if a light source with a broad band of wavelengths is directed at a vapour of atoms, ions, or molecules, the particles will absorb those wavelengths that can excite them from one quantum state to another. As a result, the absorbed wavelengths will be missing from the......
  • absorption spectrum (physics)
    ...an emission, or bright-line, spectrum. When light passes through a gas or cloud at a lower temperature than the light source, the gas absorbs at its identifying wavelengths, and a dark-line, or absorption, spectrum will be formed....
  • Abstbessingen faience
    tin-glazed earthenware produced in a factory in the village of Abstbessingen, in Thuringia, which flourished probably from the first half of the 18th century to about 1816. A hayfork factory mark indicates the patronage of the prince of Schwarzburg. Ordinary wares such as flower vases, tankards, and jugs are thick-bodied, with a creamy glaze; and decorations either in blue or polychrome are commo...
  • abstinence (economics)
    ...is, whether there was any identifiable contribution to the general product of society that would not be forthcoming if this form of income were not paid. He identified such a function and called it abstinence. Karl Marx denied the existence of any such function and argued that the social product must be attributed entirely to acts of labour, capital being merely the embodied labour of the past....
  • abstinence (religion)
    Abstinence and fasting are by far the most common of all ascetic practices. Among the primitive peoples, it originated, in part, because of a belief that taking food is dangerous, for demonic forces may enter the body while one is eating. Further, some foods regarded as especially dangerous were to be avoided. Fasting connected with religious festivals has very ancient roots. In ancient Greek......
  • abstinence, sexual
    the state of being unmarried and, therefore, sexually abstinent, usually in association with the role of a religious official or devotee. In its narrow sense, the term is applied only to those for whom the unmarried state is the result of a sacred vow, act of renunciation, or religious conviction. Celibacy has existed in one form or another throughout history and in virtually all the major religio...
  • abstinence syndrome (physiology)
    ...drinking. A purely pharmacological-physiological definition of alcoholism classifies it as a drug addiction that requires imbibing increasing doses to produce desired effects and that causes a withdrawal syndrome when drinking is stopped. This definition is inadequate, however, because alcoholics, unlike other drug addicts, do not always need ever-increasing doses of alcohol. Opium......
  • abstract (document)
    ...The purpose of secondary literature is to “filter” the primary information sources, usually by subject area, and provide the indicators to this literature in the form of reviews, abstracts, and indexes. Over the past 100 years there has evolved a system of disciplinary, national, and international abstracting and indexing services that acts as a gateway to several attributes......
  • abstract algebra (mathematics)
    branch of mathematics concerned with the general algebraic structure of various sets (such as real numbers, complex numbers, matrices, and vector spaces), rather than rules and procedures for manipulating their individual elements....
  • abstract alphabet (information theory)
    At some point in the evolution of written languages, the method of representation shifted from the pictographic to the phonetic: speech sounds began to be represented by an alphabet of graphic symbols. Combinations of a relatively small set of such symbols could stand for more complex concepts as words, phrases, and sentences. The invention of the written phonetic alphabet is thought to have......
  • abstract animation (motion pictures)
    Although abstract animation can be realized through orthodox animation techniques (as in parts of Fantasia, 1940), it may also be inked or painted directly onto the film. This form of abstract animation was pioneered in the 1920s with the individual and collaborative work of the German Hans Richter and the Swede Viking Eggeling and continued in the......
  • abstract art
    painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, colour, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and ...
  • abstract data type (computing)
    Abstract data types (ADTs) are important for large-scale programming. They package data structures and operations on them, hiding internal details. For example, an ADT table provides insertion and lookup operations to users while keeping the underlying structure, whether an array, list, or binary tree, invisible. In object-oriented languages, classes are ADTs and objects are instances of them.......
  • Abstract Design in American Quilts (American exhibition)
    The 1970s marked a quilt revival, thanks in part to the nostalgic interest in crafts generated by the American Bicentennial. Often cited as a major influence was a 1971 exhibit, “Abstract Design in American Quilts,” curated by Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, in which vintage quilts, many of them Amish-made, were......
  • Abstract Expressionism (art)
    broad movement in American painting that began in the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still, Ph...
  • abstract garden
    Two characteristic Japanese styles are the abstract garden and the tea garden. The most famous example of the former is the garden of the Ryōan-ji in Kyōto, where an area about the size of a tennis court is covered with raked sand and set with 15 stones divided into five groups. If anything is represented here, it is some rocky islets in a sea, but the appeal of the garden lies......
  • abstract music
    instrumental music that carries some extramusical meaning, some “program” of literary idea, legend, scenic description, or personal drama. It is contrasted with so-called absolute, or abstract, music, in which artistic interest is supposedly confined to abstract constructions in sound. It has been stated that the concept of program music does not represent a genre in itself but......
  • abstract poem
    a term coined by Edith Sitwell to describe a poem in which the words are chosen for their aural quality rather than specifically for their sense or meaning. An example from “Popular Song” in Sitwell’s Façade (1923) follows: The red retriever-haired satyrCan whine and tease her and flatter,But Lil...
  • abstract space (mathematics)
    French mathematician known chiefly for his contributions to real analysis. He is credited with being the founder of the theory of abstract spaces....
  • abstracting (document)
    ...The purpose of secondary literature is to “filter” the primary information sources, usually by subject area, and provide the indicators to this literature in the form of reviews, abstracts, and indexes. Over the past 100 years there has evolved a system of disciplinary, national, and international abstracting and indexing services that acts as a gateway to several attributes......
  • abstraction (concept formation)
    In the second half of the 20th century the term nominalism took on a somewhat broader sense than the one it had in the medieval dispute about universals. It is now used as a name for any position which denies the existence of abstract entities of any sort, including not only universals but also numbers, sets, and other abstracta which form the apparent subject matter of......
  • abstraction
    painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, colour, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and ...
  • abstraction, principle of (mathematics)
    ...of appropriate, specific objects, the result is a declarative sentence that is true or false. Given any formula S(x) that contains the letter x (and possibly others), Cantor’s principle of abstraction asserts the existence of a set A such that, for each object x, x ∊ A if and only if S(x) holds. (Mathemat...
  • Abstraction-Création (art group)
    association of international painters and sculptors that from 1931 to 1936 promoted the principles of pure abstraction in art....
  • Absurd, Theatre of the
    dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those ...
  • absurdity (literature and philosophy)
    ...the other area in which his ongoing experiments were most noteworthy, if not always successful, was that of dramatic language. Ironically, one of his most successful plays (and productions) was an Absurdist drama, Yā ṭāliʿ al-shajarah (1962; The Tree Climber), where the usage of the standard literary language in dialo...
  • ABT (American ballet company)
    ballet company based in New York City and having an affiliated school. It was founded in 1939 by Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant and presented its first performance on Jan. 11, 1940. Chase was director, with Oliver Smith, from 1945 to 1980; the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was artistic director from 1980 to 1989....
  • Abu (island, Egypt)
    island in the Nile opposite Aswān city in Aswān muḥāfaẓah (governorate), Upper Egypt. Elephantine is the Greek name for pharaonic Abu. There the 18th- and 19th-dynasty pharaohs built a large temple to Khnum, the ram god of the cataract region, to his consort, Sati, and to Anuket, goddess of nearby Sehel. To the north stands the Old and Middle Kingdom shrin...
  • Abu (India)
    city, southwestern Rājasthān state, northwestern India. It is situated on the slopes of Mount Ābu, an isolated feature of the Arāvali Range. The city is a noted hill resort, and the Jaina temples at nearby Dilwara, built of white marble, are famous. Tejpāl temple, built about ad 1200, is known for the delicacy and richness of its ...
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥarith ibn Asad al-ʿAnazī al-Muḥāsibī (Muslim theologian)
    eminent Muslim mystic (Ṣūfī) and theologian renowned for his psychological refinement of pietistic devotion and his role as a precursor of the doctrine of later Muslim orthodoxy. His main work was ar-Ri ʿāyah li-ḥūqūq Allah, in which he acknowledges asceticism to be valuable as an act of supererogation but always to be tempered by inne...
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Yūsuf ibn Naṣr al-Aḥmar (Naṣrid ruler)
    Constructed on a plateau that overlooks the city of Granada, the palace was built chiefly between 1238 and 1358, in the reigns of Ibn al-Ahmar, founder of the Naṣrid dynasty, and his successors. The splendid decorations of the interior are ascribed to Yūsuf I (d. 1354). After the expulsion of the Moors in 1492, much of the interior was effaced and the furniture was ruined or......
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Mālik ibn Anas ibn al-Ḥārith al-Aṣbaḥī (Muslim legist)
    Muslim legist who played an important role in formulating early Islāmic legal doctrines....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Qudāʿī (Islamic scholar)
    historian, theologian, and humorist who became one of the most famous students of Islāmic Spain....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad az-Zaghall (Naṣrid sultan)
    ...and with the aid of the Abencerrajes family seized the Alhambra in 1482 and was recognized as sultan. Abū al-Ḥasan succeeded in recapturing the capital but was deposed by his brother az-Zaghall (Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad az-Zaghall). On Boabdil’s first military venture (1483) against the Castilians, he was captured and to obtain his release signed ...
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Lawātī al-Tanjī ibn Baṭṭūṭah (Muslim explorer and writer)
    the greatest medieval Arab traveller and the author of one of the most famous travel books, the Riḥlah (Travels), which describes his extensive travels covering some 75,000 miles (more than 120,000 km) in trips to almost all the Muslim countries and to regions as far as China and Sumatra....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abī Isḥāq Ibrāhīm an-Nafzī al-Ḥimyarī al-Rundī (Islamic theologian)
    Islamic theologian who became the leading mystical thinker of North Africa in the 14th century....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Idrīs ash-Shāfiʿī (Muslim legist)
    Muslim legal scholar who played an important role in the formation of Islāmic legal thought and was the founder of the Shāfiʿīyah school of law. He also made a basic contribution to religious and legal methodology with respect to the use of traditions....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (Muslim scholar)
    one of the greatest Muslim compilers and scholars of Ḥadīth (the recorded corpus of the sayings and acts of the Prophet Muḥammad). His chief work is accepted by Sunnite Muslims—i.e., those following the majority tradition—as second only to the Qurʾān as both a source of religious law and a sacred work....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Jābir ibn Sinān al-Battānī al-Ḥarrānī al-Ṣābiʾ (Arab astronomer and mathematician)
    Arab astronomer and mathematician who refined existing values for the length of the year and of the seasons, for the annual precession of the equinoxes, and for the inclination of the ecliptic. He showed that the position of the Sun’s apogee, or farthest point from the Earth, is variable and that annular (central but incomplete) eclipses of the Sun are possible. He improved Ptolemy’s...
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Idrīs al-Ḥammūdi al-Ḥasanī al-Idrīsī (Arab geographer)
    Arab geographer, an adviser to Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily. He wrote one of the greatest works of medieval geography, Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (“The Pleasure Excursion of One Who Is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World”)....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Tūmart (Berber Muslim leader)
    Berber spiritual and military leader who founded the al-Muwaḥḥidūn confederation in North Africa (see Almohads). The doctrine he taught combined a strict conception of the unity of God with a program of juridical and puritanical moral reform, based on a study of the Qurʾān and of tradition....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Wāqidī (Arabian historian)
    Arab historian, author of the Kitāb al-maghāzī, a well-known work on the military campaigns (al-maghāzī) of the Prophet Muhammad....
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar ibn al-Ḥusayn Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (Muslim theologian)
    Muslim theologian and scholar, author of one of the most authoritative commentaries on the Qurʾān in the history of Islām. His aggressiveness and vengefulness created many enemies and involved him in numerous intrigues. His intellectual brilliance, however, was universally acclaimed and attested by such works as Mafāṭīḥ al-ghayb or Kit...
  • Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad XI (Naṣrid ruler)
    last Naṣrid sultan of Granada, Spain. His reign (1482–92) was marked by incessant civil strife and the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Roman Catholic rulers of Aragon and Castile....
  • Abū ʿAbdallāh ibn Mājā (Muslim scholar)
    ...arranged by matn—those of al-Bukhārī (d. 870), Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj (d. 875), Abū Dāʾūd (d. 888), at-Tīrmidhī (d. 892), Ibn Mājāh (d. 886), and an-Nasāʾī (d. 915)—came to be recognized as canonical in orthodox Islam, though the books of al-Bukhārī and Musli...
  • Abū ʿAbdollāh Jaʿfar ibn Moḥammad (Persian poet)
    the first poet of note to compose poems in the “New Persian,” written in Arabic alphabet, widely regarded as the father of Persian poetry....
  • Abū adh-Dhawwūd Muḥammad (ʿUqaylid ruler)
    ...established themselves in Jazīrat ibn ʿUmar, Niṣībīn (modern Nusaybin, Tur.), and Balad (northern Iraq) at the end of the 10th century. Abū adh-Dhawwūd Muḥammad (reigned c. 990–996), the first ʿUqaylid, was drawn into the struggle between the Ḥamdānids and Marwānids for......
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās (Ḥafṣid ruler)
    ...between 1348 and 1370, one being ruled from Tunis and the other from Bejaïa, with the ruler of each part supported by a different Arab tribal group. After it was reunified in 1370 by Sultan Abū al-ʿAbbās, the Ḥafṣid state enjoyed periods of relative stability interspersed with strife. Political instability did not, however, prevent learning from......
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʾmūn ibn al-Rashīd (ʿAbbāsid caliph)
    seventh ʿAbbāsid caliph (813–833), known for his attempts to end sectarian rivalry in Islām and to impose upon his subjects a rationalist Muslim creed....
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Aḥmad al-Takrūrī al-Massūfī (Islamic author and jurist)
    jurist, writer, and a cultural leader of the western Sudan....
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Saffāḥ (ʿAbbāsid caliph)
    Islāmic caliph (reigned 749–754), first of the ʿAbbāsid dynasty, which was to rule over eastern Islām for approximately the next 500 years. The ʿAbbāsids were descended from an uncle of Muḥammad and were cousins to the ruling Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads were weakened by decadence and an unclear line of succession, and the...
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malīk ibn Marwān (Umayyad caliph)
    sixth caliph (reigned 705–715) of the Umayyad Arab dynasty, who is best known for the mosques constructed during his reign....
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Walīd ibn Yazīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malīk ibn Marwān (Umayyad caliph)
    caliph (reigned 743–744) of the Umayyad dynasty....
  • Abū al-ʿAbbās Muḥammad ibn Yazīd (Arab grammarian)
    Arab grammarian and literary scholar whose Al-Kāmil (“The Perfect One”) is a storehouse of linguistic knowledge....
  • Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Maʿarrī (Arab poet)
    great Arab poet, known for his virtuosity and for the originality and pessimism of his vision....
  • Abū al-ʿAtāhiyah (Arab poet)
    first Arab poet of note to break with the conventions established by the pre-Islamic poets of the desert and to adopt a simpler and freer language of the village....
  • Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (Jewish philosopher)
    The last outstanding Jewish philosopher of the Islamic East, Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (who died as a very old man sometime after 1164), also belongs to this period. An inhabitant of Iraq, he was converted to Islam in his old age (for reasons of expediency, according to his biographers). His philosophy appears to have had a strong impact on Islamic thought, though its....
  • Abū al-Faḍl Zuhayr ibn Ṃuḥammad al-Muhallabī (Arab poet)
    Arab poet attached to the Ayyūbid dynasty of Cairo....
  • Abū al-Faraj (Syrian philosopher)
    medieval Syrian scholar noted for his encyclopaedic learning in science and philosophy and for his enrichment of Syriac literature by the introduction of Arabic culture....
  • Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (Muslim scholar)
    literary scholar who composed an encyclopaedic and fundamental work on Arabic song, composers, poets, and musicians....
  • Abū al-Faraj ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Qurashī al-Iṣbahānī (Muslim scholar)
    literary scholar who composed an encyclopaedic and fundamental work on Arabic song, composers, poets, and musicians....
  • Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī (literary character)
    ...maqāmahs are written in a combination of prose, rhymed prose (sajʿ), and poetry and recount typically the encounters of the narrator ʿIsā ibn Hishām with Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī, a witty orator and talented poet who roams in search of fortune unencumbered by Islāmic conventions of honour....
  • Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrahīm al-Khaiyāmī al-Nīshaburi (Persian poet and astronomer)
    Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, renowned in his own country and time for his scientific achievements but chiefly known to English-speaking readers through the translation of a collection of his robāʿīyāt (“quatrains”) in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), by the English ...
  • Abū al-Fawāris (Būyid ruler)
    ...ad-Dawlah, died in December 1023/January 1024, Abū Kālījār’s succession to the sultan’s Iranian possessions of Fārs and Khuzistan was challenged by his uncle Abū al-Fawāris, the ruler of Kerman, to the west. By 1028 Abū Kālījār was victorious and added Kerman to his domains. In the meantime (1027) he had ...
  • Abū al-Fidāʾ (Ayyūbid ruler and author)
    Ayyūbid dynasty historian and geographer who became a local sultan under the Mamlūk empire....
  • Abū al-Fidāʾ Ismāʿīl ibn ʿAlī al-Mālik al-Muʾ (Ayyūbid ruler and author)
    Ayyūbid dynasty historian and geographer who became a local sultan under the Mamlūk empire....
  • Abū al-Ghāzī Bahādur (Khivan khan)
    khan (ruler) of Khiva and one of the most prominent historians in Chagatai Turkish literature....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan (Indian painter)
    one of the leading Mughal painters of the emperor Jahāngīr’s atelier, honoured by the emperor with the title Nādir-uz-Zamān (“Wonder of the Age”)....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan (Marīnid sultan)
    Marīnid sultan of Morocco (reigned 1331–51) who increased the territories of his dynasty and, for a brief time, created a united North African empire....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī (Naṣrid ruler)
    ...I (1333–54) at Salado River (1340) by Alfonso XI. In 1469 Christian Spain united under the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. Then, when the Naṣrid ruler Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī (1466–85) introduced a succession struggle at home, while externally antagonizing Castile by refusing to pay tribute, Naṣrid rule was finally....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī (Marīnid sultan)
    Marīnid sultan of Morocco (reigned 1331–51) who increased the territories of his dynasty and, for a brief time, created a united North African empire....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn ʿAbd Allāh ash-Shādhilī (Muslim mystic)
    Sufi Muslim theologian who was the founder of the order of the Shādhilīyah....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Hilāl ibn al-Bawwāb (Arab calligrapher)
    Arabic calligrapher of the ʿAbbāsid Age (750–1258) who reputedly invented the cursive rayḥānī and muḥaqqaq scripts. He refined several of the calligraphic styles invented a century earlier by Ibn Muqlah, including the naskhī and tawqī scripts, and collected and preserved...
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ʿIzz al-Dīn ibn al-Athīr (Arab historian)
    influential Arab historian....
  • Abū al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā ibn Jaʿfar ʿAlī al-Riḍā (Shīʿite imam)
    eighth imam of the Twelver Shīʿites, noted for his piety and learning until 817, when the caliph al-Maʾmūn, in an attempt to heal the division between the majority Sunnites and the Shīʿites, appointed him his successor. The appointment aroused varying reactions—few of them, even among the Shīʿites, wholly favourable...
  • Abū al-Hawl (monument, Al-Jīzah, Egypt)
    To the south of the Great Pyramid near Khafre’s valley temple lies the Great Sphinx. Carved out of limestone, the Sphinx has the facial features of a man but the body of a recumbent lion; it is approximately 240 feet (73 metres) long and 66 feet (20 metres) high. (See sphinx.)...
  • Abū al-Hayjāʾ ʿAbd Allāh (Ḥamdānid ruler)
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