Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
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Edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson with a team of more than 20 section editors.
EI-Three is the third edition of Brill's Encyclopaedia of Islam which sets out the present state of our knowledge of the Islamic World. It is a unique and invaluable reference tool, an essential key to understanding the world of Islam, and the authoritative source not only for the religion, but also for the believers and the countries in which they live.
The Third Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam is an entirely new work, with new articles reflecting the great diversity of current scholarship. It is published in five substantial segments each year, both online and in print. The new scope includes comprehensive coverage of Islam in the twentieth century and of Muslim minorities all over the world.
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Author(s): Bray, John
Ladakh (Ladākh) is a region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, bordering on Tibet, the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan [Illustration 1]. Until 1834 it was an independent kingdom. The spoken language is closely related to Tibetan. Surviving Buddhist rock sculptures dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries C.E. testify to religious and artistic influence from Kashmir. In later centuries, all the main schools of Tibetan Buddhism established monaste…
Source: Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
Author(s): Tsibenko, Veronika
The Laks are an indigenous people of the mountainous part of Dagestan, in the Northern Caucasus. Ancient Greek authors (Herodotus 7.72, Strabo 11.5.1, Plutarch, Pompey, 35) mentioned the Ligyes (Λίγυες), Legaes (Λήγας), and Leges (Λήγες), who are supposed to be the ancestors of Laks as well as of the Lezgis and some other peoples of Dagestan. The capital of Lakia, the historical land of the Laks, is Kumukh (Ar. Ghumīk), so the Laks are known also as Kazi-Kumukhs. In the sixth century C.E., Kumukh was incorporated into the Sāsānid empire. The ruling dynasty became related …
Laʾl
Author(s): Beach, Milo
Laʾl (also Lāl, fl. 988–1014/1580–1605) was an important and prolific artist in the workshops of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–1605), contributing illustrations to most major imperial manuscript projects. His name, a single word as was customary, indicates that he was Hindu, as were many of his colleagues in the imperial workshops. We know no further details of his early life. He was the father of Kishendas, a minor artist and workshop administrator (Seyller, Scribal notes, 275). Laʾl's importance in Akbar's workshops is clearly stated in the Āʾīn-i Akbarī ("Annals of …
Lala Mustafa Paşa
Author(s): Costantini, Vera
Lala Mustafa (Lālā Muṣṭafā) Paşa (d. 988/1580) was a tenth-/sixteenth-century Ottoman vizier and military commander. He was born in the Bosnian village of Soqol (on an unknown date) and admitted to the Sultan's court thanks to his influential family connections. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the Ottoman hierarchy, but incurred the disfavour of the grand vizier Rustem (Rūstem) Paşa (d. 968/1561) in 962/1555. He was associated with the entourage of Süleyman (Süleymān) I's (r. 926–74/1520–66) most probable successor Bayezid (Bāyezīd, 931–69/1525–61) and was appointed lala ( lāl…
Lala Şahin Paşa
Author(s): Kastritsis, Dimitris J.
Lala Şahin (Lālā Şāhīn) Paşa (d. 788/1386?) was tutor ( lala) to the Ottoman sultan Murad (Murād) I (763–91/1362–89) and the first person in the Ottoman state to hold the title of beylerbey ( beglerbegi, lit. "lord of lords," in this period, commander-in-chief of the army; in later usage, governor general). Apparently, Şahin was a convert to Islam, and, according to Taşköprülüzade (Taşköprülüzāde (also Taşköprüzade, Taşköprizade), d. 968/1561), a manumitted slave of Sultan Orhan (Orkhān, r. c.724–63/1324–62). Circa 760/1359, Orh…
Lālla Awīsh al-Majdhūba
Author(s): van Beek, Mariëtte
Lālla Awīsh al-Majdhūba was a waliyya ṣāliḥa (virtuous saint) whose nicknames and oral histories help explain the rituals that are performed at her sanctuary in Assoual, in the medina of Marrakech. The local historian Ibn al-Muwaqqit (fl. ninth/fifteenth-century) mentions Lālla Awīsh al-Majdhūba in his al-Saʿāda al-abadiyya ("Eternal happiness"), but he gives no birth or death date. He relates a short story about a poor man whom she transported miraculously from Mecca to Marrakech, together with her sheep, and says that she travelled to and from Mecca daily. Her run-down zāwiya (san…
al-Lamkī, Aḥmad
Author(s): Ghazal, Amal
Aḥmad b. Muhammad b. Nāṣir al-Lamkī (1929–97), a prominent member of the Omani community in Zanzibar, was a political activist, newspaper editor, and ambassador. He was born in Zanzibar to a wealthy Omani family and was sent to Cairo at the age of ten to pursue his education. He resided in Cairo between 1939 and 1951, worked for Radio Cairo, and spent the last two years in prison for his anti-British and anti-monarchy activities. He then moved to London where he co-founded the Association of Zanzibar…
Larbi Ben Sari
Author(s): Glasser, Jonathan
Larbi Ben Sari (al-ʿArbī b. Ṣārī, b. c.1870, d. 1964), often known by the honorific Shaykh al-ʿArbī (Cheikh Larbi), was the leading performer of the classical Arab-Andalusian musical tradition in the western Algerian city of Tlemcen during the twentieth century. Inheritor of a vast instrumental and vocal repertoire transmitted, through the end of the nineteenth century, by word of mouth and through manuscript collections of poetic texts, Cheikh Larbi played a key role in defining, conserving, and …
Lawu, Sunan
Author(s): Ricklefs, M. C.
Sunan Lawu, the spirit of Mount Lawu—an active volcano 3,265 metres high on the border between Central and East Java, Indonesia, east of the court city of Surakarta—appears to be an ancient deity. An Old Javanese manuscript that refers to King Kertanagara (d. 1292) of the East Javanese kingdom of Singhasari and deals with regulations for Hindu-Buddhist religious elites refers to the dewa giri Lalawu (the deity of Mount Lawu) (Pigeaud, 3:132). There are two remarkable fifteenth-century Hindu temples, Candhi Sukuh and Candhi Cetha, on the mountain, both celebr…
Layennes
Author(s): Glover, John
The Layennes are a Ṣūfī order of Senegal. Like the better known Murīdiyya, founded in Senegal in 1883 by Amadou Bamba (d. 1927), they take pride in their Senegalese origins. The Layennes are a small group, numbering about thirty thousand, and are concentrated amongst the Lebu people of the Cap-Vert region and the surrounding coast. The Layennes (lit., people of Allāh) were founded in 1884 by the Lebu fisherman Libasse Thiaw (d. 1909), who claimed to be the mahdī and the bodily reincarnation of the prophet Muḥammad. Dubbed by his Lebu disciples Seydina Limamou Laye (lit., our master, the imām …
Author(s): Bellér-Hann, Ildikó
The Laz (self-designation, Lazi) are an ethnic group concentrated in the southeastern corner of the Black Sea, in the Turkish provinces of Artvin and Rize. A minority lives on the Georgian side of the modern state border. The Laz in northeast Turkey share space with neighbouring groups, including ethnic Turks, Hemshin, and Georgians. Together with Mingrelian, Georgian, and Svan, their language (Lazuri) belongs to the South-Caucasian family. Migrants from the northeast (today's southern Abkhazia),…
Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia
Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia (LDII, the Indonesian Islamic Proselytisation Institute) is a controversial and, in the eyes of its opponents, an extremist and deviant Islamic organisation. It has changed its name several times after being banned under previous names and was known serially as Darul Hadis, Islam Jamaah, Yayasan Karyawan Islam (YAKARI), and Lembaga Karyawan Islam (LEMKARI) before adopting the name Lembaga Dakwah Islam Indonesia in 1990. After living for ten years in Mecca, H. Nurhasan Ubaidah Lubis (d. 1982), the founder of this organisation, retu…
Lembaga Kajian Islam dan Sosial
Author(s): Hefner, Robert W.
Lembaga Kajian Islam dan Sosial (LKIS, Institute for Islamic and Social Studies) is a Muslim non-governmental training institute and publishing house established in 1993 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although it has experienced financial challenges in recent years, LKIS's publishing house remains one of Indonesia's two premier publishers of critical Muslim scholarship on classical fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), human rights, and Muslim feminism. LKIS alumni have spawned an assortment of educational and activist initiatives, most of them aimed at invok…
Leo Africanus
Author(s): Cresti, Federico
Leo Africanus (d. c.938/1532?) is the name by which al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Wazzān al-Fāsī was known in the Christian world and the name by which he continues to be known in the West today. Of Andalusian origin (born in Granada sometime between 891/1486 and 901/1495) but having sought refuge in Morocco with his family and later taken to Italy as a slave, he converted to Christianity and was baptised with the name of Giovanni Leone dei Medici. He was the author of various works, including a descri…
Leran is a town in East Java where an early gravestone was found that was once and is still occasionally regarded, erroneously, as shedding light on the early Islamisation of Java. Leran was a major port, which, to judge from archaeological evidence, flourished especially from the fifth/eleventh century to the seventh/thirteenth. The stone found there marked the grave of a woman named Bint Maymūn b. Hibatallāh, who died in 475/1082. Recent analysis of the stone by Ludvik Kalus and Claude Guillot…
Levant Company
Author(s): Vlami, Despina
The English Levant Company was a corporation of English merchants who, under a royal charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1581, enjoyed a trading monopoly with the Ottoman Empire and, after 1592, with Venice. Additionally, the company organized and subsidised British diplomatic representation in the Ottoman Empire. In 1581, for example, William Harborne (d. 1617), a company member and distinguished merchant, was appointed by the queen as ambassador to Istanbul (Constantinople). Subsequently, the compa…
Lexicography, Persian
Author(s): Perry, John R.
Persian lexicography has been influenced by languages which include Pahlavi and Arabic and trends which include widespread use of Persian in India and a modern puristic language movement. Persian dictionaries and glossaries have developed since the fourth/tenth century and have seen various arrangements for their entries. Recent Persian lexigraphical endeavours have included a data-based dictionary which attempts to capture the reality of language as it is used in daily communication and a Perso-Arabic script dictionary for Tajik Persian. The usual premodern Persian term …
Lexicography, Urdu
Author(s): Hakala, Walter N.
Urdu lexicography, encompassing multiple genres in verse and prose that provide explanations of words and phrases, is similar to most other major New Indo-Aryan languages in the late arrival—in this case, dating the to the mid-nineteenth century—of the comprehensive monolingual dictionary. Derived primarily from the speech forms prevalent in the Delhi region of northern India, Urdu is identical in grammar to Modern Standard Hindi and is differentiated primarily by its use of the Perso-Arabic scri…