Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Kurdi, Muhammad Amin al- - Maba Diakhou Ba


Kurdi, Muhammad Amin al-
Kurdi, Muhammad Amin al- (Muhammad Amin al-Kurdi) (d.1914). One of the leading figures in the recent history of the Naqshbandiyya order, and author of several influential works, including Tanwirul-Qulub.
Muhammad Amin al-Kurdi see Kurdi, Muhammad Amin al-


Kurds
Kurds.  A linguistic-cultural group concentrated in southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and parts of Syria.  The Kurds are an Iranian people who live mainly at the junction of more or less laicized Turkey, Shi‘a Iran, Arab Sunni Iraq and North Syria, and the former Soviet Transcaucasia.  The name “Land of the Kurds” seems to date from the time of the Saljuq Sultan Sanjar.  The Kurds played an important part in the history of the Middle East.  Several dynasties, such as the Marwanids of Diyarbakr, the Ayyubids, the Shaddadids and probably the Safavids, as well as prominent personalities, were of Kurdish origin.  The Treaty of Sevres (1920) had foreseen an independent Kurdistan, but the idea was suppressed by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).

Kurds are a people of the highlands of eastern Anatolia and the northwestern section of the Zagros Mountains.  In their current disparate state, Kurds can be found over five international borders, from Iran and Iraq to Turkey, Syria, and the Soviet Union.  The land of Kurdistan is predominantly mountainous but is interrupted frequently by fertile and well-watered valleys, some of which are, like the plains of Mahi Dasht, of unusual fertility and expanse.  Many of the major rivers of Southwest Asia have their source in Kurdistan, such as the Tigris, Euphrates, Araks, Kura, Kizil Irmak, Safid Rud, and Karkheh.  The heartland of Kurdistan is the area bordered on the southeast by two tributaries of the Tigris, the Little and the Great Zab, and on the northwest by Lake Urmia.  This area has been known successively as Gutium, Kardush, and Ardalan. 

The origins of the Kurds are still somewhat uncertain.  Variations of the word "Kurd" appear regularly in ancient sources.  Of the invaders from the mountainous region of “Gutium,” Naram-Sin (2291-2255 B.C.T.), king of Agade (Akkadia), said, “in the mist of the mountains they grew up, they became virile, they acquired stature ....” The Gutis set up a dynasty in Sumeria (c.2250-2120 B.C.T.).  Akkadian sources mention a mountain kingdom of Gutium to the east and north of Assyria as one of the regions annexed by the Kassite rulers of Akkadia around 1400 B.C.T.   Assyrian sources of the late second millenium also mention Gutium, the country of the “Gutis” to the east and north of Assyria.  Babylonian tablets of the sixth century B.C.T. enumerate the “Kardakas” among the Babylonian royal guards.  The “Carduchis,” “Cardaces,” or “Kurtioi” are credited by Greek and Roman writers with playing a considerable role in the latter history of the Persian Achaemenid empire.  In post-Achaemenid times, the form Gordyene was more commonly employed by historians.  It remained the dominant form until the beginning of the Islamic age, when the term Kurdistan was finally established for the country.

The Islamic conquests of the seventh century of the Christian calendar opened a much clearer chapter in the history of the Kurds.  Kurds set up various dynasties, both within Kurdistan and beyond, and some of these acquired great distinction: the Shaddadids of Arran and eastern Armenia (c. 951-1174); the Rawwadids of Azerbaijan (early tenth century to 1071); the Marwanids of central and eastern Anatolia (983-1085); and the Ayyubids of Egypt, Syria, northern Mesopotamia, and the Yemen (1169 to the end of the fifteenth century), of whom Saladin, famous for his defeat of the Crusaders, is the most celebrated.  The illustrious Safavids of Persia (1501-1722), although a Turkic-speaking dynasty, were quite probably of Kurdish origin as well.  The Zands of Persia (1750-1794) were the last Kurds to found a ruling dynasty before the eclipse of Kurdish fortunes in modern times.

From 1514 to the middle of the sixteenth century the western parts of Kurdistan passed into Ottoman hands, while the smaller eastern portion stayed under the jurisdiction of various dynasties of Persia.  This situation continued until the end of World War I, when the Ottoman portion was divided into Syrian, Iraqi, and Turkish sections.  The Kurdish regions of the Caucasus had already passed into Russian hands by the early nineteenth century.

The twentieth century has brought Kurdistan a degree of fragmentation never before experienced by the Kurds.  With the advent of modern states and well-guarded national boundaries in the Southwest Asia, the movement of Kurds and the exchange of ideas and culture among the five fragments of Kurdistan has become exceedingly difficult.  This situation was worsened by the reserved or hostile relations among the countries under whose jurisdiction the Kurds live.  Faced with this fragmentation and the outright denial of their national rights the Kurds became a very politicized and embattled people, usually at odds with the governments under which they live.  Kurdish history in the twentieth century was marked by frustration: deportations, wars, popular uprisings, and the formation and liquidation of many Kurdish political parties and declarations of independence.  More than once have the Kurds been caught in political and physical crossfire because of their tenuous existence on the border regions of these states.  A major force in Southwest Asia for millenia, the Kurds, despite their fragmentation, remain a vital people steadfastly resisting assimilation and elimination.

The linguistic, cultural, and racial “aryanization” of the aboriginal Caucasoid Kurds seems to have begun by the beginning of the second millennium B.C.T. with the continuous immigration and settlement of the Indo-European tribes such as the Kassites, Mitannis, Armenians, Medes, Sakas (Scythians), and Persians.  This process probably was completed by the middle of the first millennium B.C.T. at the latest, by which time the Kurds had formed the basis of their contemporary ethnic identity. 

The Islamic era brought with it yet another wave of immigrations and settlements in Kurdistan: first the Arabs and later the much more numerous Turkic and Mongol tribes.  In Kurdistan today, there are a few Arabic but many more Turkic and Mongol place and tribal names.  Except for the Christian and Jewish populations, and a few Turkmen enclaves in Iraqi Kurdistan, the settlers generally have been assimilated into the Kurdish nation.

The Kurds themselves proved to be at least as mobile as these immigrants.  The early migrations of the Kurds are, however, quite difficult to trace.  As early as the time of Strabo, the word Kurd, or kurtioi as he wrote it, was a very general term loosely applied to all those mountain pastoralists living a way of life similar to that of the Kurds.  This general usage of the term continued until about the fifteenth century of the Christian calendar, when all of the semi-sedentary and tribal peoples of the Zagros range, from the Strait of Hormuz to central Anatolia, were still referred to as Kurds.  The valor and energy of the Kurdish mountaineers often marked them for military service in the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Arabian, Turkish, and even Russian armies (a Kurdish regiment played a crucial role in the Battle of Minsk in World War II).  Large segments of the Kurdish population were sometimes transferred to the far borders of one or another empire to man garrisons against outside intrusions.  Thus, Kurdish communities can be found in places as far apart as Ferghana, on the Chinese border; the shores of the Aegean Sea; and the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The more general migrations of the Kurds and their colonization of new territories are less enigmatic but as poorly documented.  Many of their movements resulted in the assimilation of the Kurds into the indigenous population.  Such was the fate of many populous Kurdish tribes, such as the Shaqaqi, who settled in Azerbaijan, Arran, and Shirvan in the last millennium.  The Kurdish immigration into Armenia, on the other hand, resulted in the gradual colonization of the region by the Kurds.  The Kurdish settlement in Armenia proper must have begun before the advent of Islam.  By the tenth century of the Christian calendar, they were already living in the environs of Lake Van, the heartland of historic Armenia.  The annihilation of the Armenians, the last indigenous people of eastern Anatolia, at the end of World War I left the area predominantly Kurdish.  This act effectively converted the Armenian Plateau into a de facto component of contemporary Kurdistan.

It is safe to assume that the Kurds’ adoption of an Indo-European, Iranian language and culture in the course of the first millennium B.C.T. entailed the worship of Aryan deities as well.  Zoroastrianism seems to have made inroads in Kurdistan by the end of the Sasanid era (224-640) and the introduction of Christianity and Islam only added to the religious diversity of Kurdistan.  At present, the Kurdish-speaking Kurds are nominally Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’i rite, but the bonds of the Kurds to different Sufi orders (tariqas), such as the Naqshbandi, Qadiri, and Bektashi, some holding heterodox views, brings the Kurds’ “orthodoxy” into question.

The Gurani speakers of southeastern Kurdistan were overwhelmingly of the Ahi-i Haq sect, commonly identified as an extremist sect.  In fact, the Kurds were termed ghulat (“extremists”) by medieval Muslim observers such as Nizam al-Mulk.  The Zaza speakers of Anatolia adhere to the more conventional Alawite branch of the Shi‘a.  A large number of Kurdish Muslims, particularly in the major Kurdish cities, do, however, adhere to the conventionally recognized Islamic denominations. 

The Yazidis, predominantly of the Sanjar region of Iraq and Syria, but also living in eastern Anatolia and the Soviet Caucasus, practice a religion, admittedly non-Islamic, that exhibits many Zoroastrian or even early Aryan cult features.  Kurdistan is also home to adherents of Judaism and of many established Christian sects, but their numbers, never large, are presently shrinking. 

Kurds have been living under foreign rulers for centuries, and have never, up through history, formed larger states or dynasties.  In this century, there have been several serious attempts on creating a Kurdistan.  Kurds were promised their own state by the Allied forces after World War I.  Kurdistan was promised to be established on Turkish territory, but this promise was never kept.

Iraqi Kurds have fought against the Iraqi governments on numerous occasions including 1962 to 1970 and 1974 to 1975.  The Kurds were promised autonomy in 1970 to end their struggle then, and they had to give up fighting after a normalization of relations between Iran and Iraq in 1975. 

A Kurdish rebellion in Turkey began in 1984.  This rebellion continued throughout the end of the twentieth century, even though nothing was gained.   The struggle of the Kurds in Turkey cast dark shadows over the image that the international community had of Turkey.

A Kurdish rebellion in Iraq started on the eve of the Gulf War in 1991, but was quickly suppressed by the Iraqi army, forcing one million Kurds to flee to Turkey. 

From 1992 to 1996, a zone in northern Iraq was controlled by the United Nations, and this area was as close as the Kurds ever have been to achieving their own state.  However, the region was once again secured by Saddam Hussein and afterwards some Kurdish chiefs actually allied themselves with the Iraqi president.

The explanation of the United Nation’s reluctance to support the establishment of a Kurdistan must be seen from the background of the existing regional instability, the importance of the area and the fact that it would affect too many states.  If a Kurdistan was established in one country, neighboring countries would regard this as a hostile act.  In 1991, the United Nations could have taken the necessary steps to form a Kurdistan in northern Iraq, but actions of this kind would never have been accepted by NATO allied Turkey.

Today, the Kurds are a people without a politically recognized homeland.  They are a people with an urgent sense of common ethnic identity overriding long established patterns of diversity in tribal affiliation, ways of life and religious practice.  An essentially Muslim people, although locally adhering to different sects and orders, they are widely distributed throughout central Southwest Asia.  However, no where do they dominate or even reflect their numbers in a national political system.

The large majority of Kurds are Sunni of the Shafi school of law, except in Iran and parts of Iraq where many are Shi‘a. 

Presently, the Sunni Kurds of Iraq are committed to a protracted struggle for local autonomy or independence.  The immediate origins of this effort lie in the nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  With the division of Kurdistan within the Ottoman empire between Anglo-French spheres of influence in 1918, Kurdish nationalist agitation became more militant and better organized.  In Iran, Kurdish uprisings occurred from 1920 to 1925, in part coordinated with nationalist efforts in Iraq.  By 1930, Reza Shah was able to pacify the region around Lake Urmiyah, partly by organizing local Turkish resistance to Kurdish rule.  Kurdish tribal leaders were exiled and their land confiscated.  However, in 1945, following the collapse of Iranian authority in the area, the Kurdish republic of Mahabad was established, only to fall in 1946 with the withdrawal of Soviet support.  In 1979, most of the Kurdish population of Iran boycotted the national referendum establishing the Islamic Republic.  Shortly thereafter a series of uprisings, notably in 1979 and 1981, were met by strong resistance. 

In Turkey, shortly after that country became a republic in 1924, the Kurdish populations of Diyarbakir and Elazig provinces revolted but were rapidly subdued.  Armed conflict between Kurdish units and the Turkish army persisted sporadically until 1946.  Local Kurdish unrest and political resistance have continued, but on a small scale, and have been effectively countered by the Turkish government.  Kurdish participation in the national party system in Turkey has given high priority to the economic and educational development of the eastern provinces.

In addition to the Kurds living in the Middle East, there are over millions of Kurds who make up a Kurdish diaspora placing Kurds in significant numbers in Western Europe and the Americas.


Kuri
Kuri.  A small, dynamic, insular people living on and around Lake Chad, their future appears to be one of immersion and disappearance within the neighboring Buduma.

The word “Kuri” means “the ones who live on islands,” as opposed to the meaning of “Buduma”, “the ones who live in grass.”  Old Kuris tell this story of their origin:

"During a halt in the village of Sulu, near Rig Rig, a Kanembu chief’s daughter died.  Like all Kanembu women, she was wearing silver rings about her ankles.  Unable to remove them, the father buried his daughter with the rings.  During the night, his son, Diledim, exhumed her body, broke her ankles and took the rings.  In the morning, the father discovered the act and expelled his son, who fled to the islands, where eventually he married a Buduma girl.  His descendants were called Kuri and populated the eastern islands."

According to legend, Diledim’s five sons, Kura, Kalia, Medi, Yakudi, and Ngadji, left home.  Medi took the road to Bornu (he had been accused of being a kindra, or sorcerer.  The others settled near Isseiron and fought among themselves:  Kalia, Yakudi and Ngadji opposing Kura, who was joined by Medi.

In 1956, an exceptional rise in Lake Chad decimated the herds and reduced the number of islands.  Many Kuri withdrew to dry land to await subsidence and became interested in the polders when, at the end of the last century, they blocked the arm of the lake with two dams and, when the water subsided, farmed the fertile lake bottom.  Polders are now a prime economic asset around Lake Chad.

Since 1956, the Kuri have lived on both the main islands and on the edge of the lake around polders and in temporary villages where each family cultivates wheat and corn.  Fishing has been of decreasing interest to them.  Stockbreeding continues its importance, but cross-breeding has reduced the purity of the Kuri cattle.




"Ones Who Live on Islands" see Kuri.


Kusayla ibn Lamzam
Kusayla ibn Lamzam (Kasila ibn Lamzam) (Kusaila) (Kosaila) (Koceila) (Kasila) (d. 690).  One of the most eminent figures in the struggle of the Berbers to preserve their independence during the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Kusayla was a chief of the Awraba tribe.of the Berber people and head of the Sanhaja confederation.  He is known for prosecuting an effective Romano-Berber resistance to the Muslim Arab expansion into North Africa in the 680s.

Kusayla grew up during the time of the Byzantine exarchate in North Africa and was probably educated in Romano-Byzantine ways.  Kusayla led a Christian-Berber force of 50,000 that defeated the Arabs and felled Uqba ibn Nafi at Tahudha near Biskra in 683.  In 688, Arab reinforcements arrived under Zuhair ibn Kays. Kusayla met them in 690 at the Battle of Mamma. Vastly outnumbered, the Awraba were defeated and Kusayla was killed. 

The religious affiliation of Kusayla is of some historical debate.  According to late accounts, around 678, the amir of the invading Arabs, who was then the freed slave named Abu al-Muhajir Dinar invited Kusayla to meet with him in his camp.  Abu al-Muhajir Dinar persuaded Kusayla to convert to Islam and to join his army with a promise of full equality with Arabs.  The reason why Abu al-Muhajir Dinar was successful in converting Kusayla to Islam is that Abu was not an Arab but rather a convert to the religion, thereby dissolving any apprehensions that Kusayla might have had that Islam is only an Arab religion.
 
Abu al-Muhajir thoroughly impressed Kusayla with not only piety but with his high sense of respect and eitquette.  Kusayla incorporated the Awraba-Sanhaja into the conquering Arab force and participated in their uniformly successful campaigns under Abu al-Muhajir.

Abu al-Muhajir was forcibly replaced by Uqba ibn Nafi who treated Kusayla with contempt. Eventually Uqba's disrespect enraged Kusayla and provoked a plot of revenge.  On the army's return from Morocco, Uqba allowed his troops to break up and go home.  The remainder, about 5,000 men, was vulnerable and exhausted.  On the return march to Kaiouran, Kusayla joined with the Byzantine forces and organized an ambush.

The Christian-Berber force, 50,000 strong, defeated the Arabs and killed Uqba at Tahudha near Biskra in 683. 

It should be noted that the above account is disputed by some historians.  According to these historians, Abu al-Muhajir had no connection to Kusayla, nor did Uqba ibn Nafi until the time of the ambush at Tahudha.  These historians also describe Kusayla as a Christian.  These historians do agree, however, that Kusayla led a combined Byzantine-Berber force when he defeated Uqba and that, for a time, he was the undisputed master of North Africa.

 

Kasila ibn Lamzam see Kusayla ibn Lamzam
Kusaila see Kusayla ibn Lamzam
Kosaila see Kusayla ibn Lamzam
Koceila see Kusayla ibn Lamzam
Kasila see Kusayla ibn Lamzam


Kush
Kush (Cush). The Biblical personage is not named in the Qur’an.  Islamic tradition knows his name but supplies pieces of evidence which do not agree totally with one another or with the evidence of the Bible.  From this name, the word Cushitic/Kushitic is derived, under which are grouped a body of Hamitic languages spoken by about fifteen million people, the majority of them Muslims.  The area in which they live is constituted basically by the Horn of Africa and spreads in the north into Sudanese and Egyptian territory and in the south into Tanzania.

Cush (Kush) was the eldest son of Ham, brother of Canaan and the father of Nimrod, and Raamah, mentioned in the "Table of Nations" in the Hebrew Bible (Book of Genesis 10:6, I Chronicles 1:8). The name is usually considered to be the eponym of the people of Kush.  According to Genesis, Cush's other sons were Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, and Sabtecah, names identified by modern scholars with Arabian tribes.

The Persian historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (c. 915) recounts a tradition that the wife of Cush was named Qarnabil, daughter of Batawil, son of Tiras, and that she bore him the "Abyssinians, Sindis and Indians".


Cush see Kush


Kushiyar ibn Laban
Kushiyar ibn Laban (Abul-Hasan Kūshyār ibn Labbān ibn Bashahri Gilani) (Kushyar Gilani) (971 - 1029).  Persian astronomer and mathematician from the tenth through the eleventh century.  His fame rests on his Roots of the Indian System of Calculation, i.e., of the system of numeration by position, the value of the figures depending on their place in a number.  This brought about a revolution in the ways of calculating as used in the Middle East.

Abul-Hasan Kūshyār ibn Labbān ibn Bashahri Gilani was a Persian mathematician, geographer, and astronomer from Jilan, south of the Caspian Sea, Iran.

His main work was probably done about the beginning of the eleventh century, and seems to have taken an important part in the elaboration of trigonometry. For example, he continued the investigations of Abul Wáfa, and devoted much space to this in his zij (or collection of tables) az-Zīj al-Jamī wal-Baligh ("the comprehensive and mature tables"), which incorporated the improved values of the planetary apogees observed by al-Battani. The tables were translated into Persian before the end of the century. He wrote also an astrological introduction and an arithmetic treatise (extant in Hebrew).

He was the teacher of Ahmad Nasawi. He is thought to have died in Baghdad.
Abul-Hasan Kūshyār ibn Labbān ibn Bashahri Gilani see Kushiyar ibn Laban
Gilani, Abul-Hasan Kūshyār ibn Labbān ibn Bashahri see Kushiyar ibn Laban
Kūshyār Gilani see Kushiyar ibn Laban
Gilani, Kūshyār see Kushiyar ibn Laban


Kutubi, Abu ‘Abd Allah al-
Kutubi, Abu ‘Abd Allah al- (Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Kutubi) (c.1287-1363). Syrian historian.  His two surviving works are a large history containing valuable observations on Syrian intellectual and religious life, and a biographical work, which contains a wealth of literary information, mainly on Syrian litterateurs.
Abu 'Abd Allah al-Kutubi see Kutubi, Abu ‘Abd Allah al-


Labbai
Labbai. The Tamil-speaking Muslims of Tamilnadu State, India, are collectively known as the Labbai.  They are divided into four distinct groupings: the Rawther, Labbai, Marakkayar and Kayalar.  Since the generic name for the community is the same as one of the four subgroups, the term “Labbai” is used here only for the subgroup, the whole group being termed Muslim Tamils.  Slightly less than five percent of Tamilnadu’s population is Muslim, with perhaps eighty percent of these being Muslim Tamils.  The remaining Muslims, most of whom live in Tamilnadu’s cities, belong to various other communities including the Mappillas, who are Malayalam speakers, and Urdu-speaking communities including the Shaikh, Sayyid, Sharif, Pathan, Ismaili, Navayat, Daudi Bohra, Wahhabi and a catch-all group, the Deccani.

The Muslim Tamils are descendants of Arab traders and local converts.  They are an autochthonous (indigenous) population which bears the stamp of Tamil culture and the political heritage, not of conquest and rule such as northern Muslims have experienced, but of mercantilism and integration.  Since they are the indigenous population, they speak Tamil as their household language. 

According to tradition the name "Labbai" was given to the Labbai by the Arabs and the term means "Here I am."  There are two stories concerning the origin of the Arab traders that are the forefathers of the Labbai.  One story has the Arabs being driven out of Iraq in the eighth century.  Some of these exiles migrated to the west coast of India while others settled on the east of Cape Cormorin.  The Labbai are descended from this latter group.

The other version of Labbai origins has the Arabs coming to India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as traders. These Arab traders were persecuted by the Moghuls and were forced to flee to their current location.

The Muslim Tamils follow the Sunni sect of Islam.  The majority of Labbai and Rawther follow the Hanafi school, while the Kayalar and Marakkayar follow the Shafi.  The importance of this difference is slight and reflects more the differences in their origin than it does religious differences.

Labbai are one of the four Muslim groups in Tamil Nadu State. The Ravuttan, Marakkayar, and Kayalan form the rest of the Islamic community. According to tradition, the name "Labbai" was given to them by the Arabs, meaning "Here I am." Previously the Labbais were few in number and were under the control of other Muslims and Hindus. In order to get their attention and be recognized, the Labbais Traditionally would cry loudly, "Labbek," meaning "We are your servants."

Tamil is their main language, mostly spoken in the household. People living in the cities do speak Urdu, but they do not recognize it as their main language. In some Arab-influenced towns such as Nagapattinam and Kayalpatnam, Labbai Muslims write Tamil using Arabic script, the only People to do so.

The origin of the Labbais is not clear, but a few speculations have been recorded. In the early eighth century of the Christian calendar, the governor of Iraq, Hijaj Ben Gusaff, drove a number of people, including fellow Muslim citizens, into exile by his barbaric actions. Some migrated to the western coast of India and others east of Cape Comorin. The Labbais are descended from the latter group. Another version says that the Labbais are descendants of Arabs who came to India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for trade. But these Arabs were persecuted by the Moguls and were forced to flee the country, leaving behind their belongings and children born to Indian mothers.

Labbais are known as traders, although residents of different areas have different occupations. In the Mysore region, they are vendors of hardware, merchants, coffee traders, and owners of other profitable businesses. In the South Arcot District of Tamil Nadu, they grow betel nuts, manage a skin trade, are small shopkeepers, and trade at the seaports. The women of this district are expert at weaving mats, which are considered a valuable source of income. The Labbais of the Madurai District seem to have chosen a quite different means of subsistence: many are well known as smiths and others are boatworkers and fishers. In general, they are recognized as skilled and expert traders.

The Labbais worship as Muslims and recently this has had great influence on their life expectations. About 80 percent of the Muslims in Tamil Nadu are Muslim Tamils and the remaining 20 percent include the Mapillas and Urdu speakers such as Sheikh, Sayyid, Sharif, Pathan, Ismaili, Navayat, Daudi Bohra, and Wahabi. Labbais and Ravuttans follow the Hanafi school, a branch of the Sunni sect. Their Religious practices demonstrate an orthodox way of living where men and their children go to the mosques to pray, while women stay at home to pray. Religious books are in Arabic and hold a sacred position. It is considered a duty to publish books in Arabic and distribute them among people. The Muslims do not recognize the caste system of Hindus, even though in the rural areas they are recognized as ethnically different from Hindus and are categorized as a separate caste. Girls do not marry before puberty. They practice the Islamic ritual except in some areas where they have adopted a Hindu wedding ceremony. Marriage with a mother's brother's daughter is the ideal, if and only if she is the right age. Kin marriages are common to hold together the ties between families, but no marriage occurs with parallel cousins. Family gatherings and visits are used by the older family members to find mates for their young ones.


Labid ibn Rabi‘a, Abu ‘Aqil
Labid ibn Rabi‘a, Abu ‘Aqil (Abu ‘Aqil Labid ibn Rabi‘a) (d. 660 [661?]).  Arab poet.  He is said to have become a Muslim in 630 when his tribe, the ‘Amir ibn Sa‘sa‘a, made an agreement with the Prophet.  One of Labid’s qasidas was adopted into the collection of the so-called Mu‘allaqat and is thought to be one of the best specimens of Bedouin poetry.
Abu 'Aqil Labid ibn Rabi'a see Labid ibn Rabi‘a, Abu ‘Aqil


Labor Party of Egypt
Labor Party of Egypt.  An Islamist party in Egypt.  From 1987 the leading opposition party, the Labor Party was founded as the Socialist Labor Party in December 1978.  It was represented in the Egyptian parliament, the People’s Assembly, from 1979 until 1990.  In the 1987 elections, the last in which the opposition took part, the Labor Party became the leading opposition party with 17 percent of the vote and 56 out of 448 representatives.  Only 22 of these representatives, however, were party members; the majority were Muslim Brothers.  The brothers, denied recognition as a political party, had joined an Islamic alliance with the Labor Party and the small Liberal Party.  The parliamentary elections of 1990 were boycotted by the opposition.  However, in the local elections in 1992 the Labor-Muslim Brothers alliance emerged even more clearly than before as the dominant opposition force.  The Party’s twice-weekly newspaper, Al-sha‘b (The People), increased its circulation from 45,000 in late 1985 to 250,000 in early 1994, making it the largest opposition paper. 

Ibrahim Shukri, the president of the Labor Party from its inception, was a member of the last parliament before the 1952 revolution.  He was the only representative of the Socialist Party, the name taken by the Young Egypt movement from 1949.  This movement, founded in 1933, was strongly nationalist and anti-British.  Its form of Egyptian nationalism fused quite different ideological strands.  It emphasized the pharaonic heritage but at the same time took pride in Egypt’s Arabism, advocating exclusive use of the Arabic language in all fields of life.  It advocated Islamic morals as the basis for a sound social life and national strength and demanded the application of the shari‘a.  Its program of social reform included radical land reform, expanded and cheap education, and an extensive program of state-led industrialization.

The early Labor Party membership was dominated by former Young Egypt members and sympathizers.  ‘Adil Husayn, the undisputed ideologue of the party, considered its line to be a continuation of the ideas of Ahmad Husayn, the charismatic founder and leader of Young Egypt.  Kinship also bound the party to the Young Egypt tradition:  ‘Adil Husayn was Ahmad Husayn’s younger brother; Muhammad Hilmi Murad, vice president of the Labor Party, was a brother-in-law of the Husayn brothers; and Majdi Husayn, editor of the party newspaper since 1993, is the son of Ahmad Husayn.

The Labor Party was initially basically a radical nationalist party.  At the party’s fifth congress in March 1989, however, a clearcut Islamist platform was voted in, and the positions of leadership were filled exclusively with Islamists.  This provoked a major split, and many leading members, including half the parliamentary group, refused to accept the results of the conference.

A former communist, ‘Adil Husayn, general secretary of the party after 1993, referred to his ideas as “enlightened Islamism.”  He favored applying the shari‘a, but he emphasized that it must be a shari‘a for the twenty-first century.  There are some clear rulings in the Qur’an and sunnah, but wide scope is left for human reason to interpret the law in keeping with changing times and circumstances.

The Labor Party’s immediate political goal was putting an end to one-party rule and the emergency laws that severely limit freedom of political activity.  The fight against corruption at high levels was also high on the agenda and earned the party much popular sympathy.  The party linked its stand for democracy to Islam: because Islam recognizes no priesthood with a monopoly on interpreting the scriptures, the existence of different interpretations is legitimate, and this may crystallize into different political programs and parties.  However, this freedom must be regulated by respect for the Islamic framework of the state, and for what Husayn calls the state’s “grand strategy for development.”  This strategy should aim at building a strong independent Egypt that satisfies the material and spiritual needs of its inhabitants.  Local production should be boosted in order to secure independence, and this will involve strict regulation of imports.  Private capital must accept working within the limits of such a strategy.

The party was very critical of the economic open-door policy initiated under President Anwar Sadat, which it saw as undermining the basis for independent development and as carrying with it a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.  The Labor Party strongly opposed the International Monetary Fund sponsored reforms – cutting food subsidies, reducing remaining import barriers, and letting foreign capital buy into a privatized public sector.  The West, primarily the United States with its local ally Israel, was seen as the main enemy of Egyptian and Arab development.  The party sharply criticized the United States led coalition that fought Iraq during the Gulf War.

The discourse of the Labor Party on economic reform highlighted an important difference in its general approach to politics when compared with its alliance partner, the Muslim Brothers.  The writings of the Brothers on economic issues tended to proceed from traditional Islamic precepts like the canonical tax (zakat) or prohibition of interest (riba), which they discussed in the abstract.  In contrast, the Labor Party proceeded from concrete analyses of Egypt’s development problems.  Islam was not seen so much as offering readymade solutions but rather as a moral force to unite the population in enduring the effort and hardships of independent development, as well as offering broad principles of social justice and harmony.  In this sense, the Labor Party could be seen as a modernist wing within the broader Islamist movement.

Achieving unity with the Egyptian Copts on an Islamic platform was a stated goal.  In fact, in the 1987 elections the Labor Party – Muslim Brothers alliance was the only party to have a Copt topping a slate. The party stated that the Copts should have equal rights, including political rights, “at all levels,” although it was not clear whether this actually meant that a Copt would be acceptable as president or as minister for education.

The electoral alliance with the Muslim Brothers and the opening of the pages of Al-sha‘b to the Islamist movement at large expressed a central concern of the Labor Party; the establishment of the broadest possible unity both within and beyond the Islamist movement vis-à-vis the government.  In particular, the party tried to bridge the traditional gap between the Muslim Brothers and the Nasserist tendencies within the opposition.

On May 20, 2000, the Egyptian committee for political parties' affairs (the committee responsible for authorizing the formation of political parties in Egypt) decided to freeze the activities of the Labor Party and suspend its newspaper Al-sha'b. The Committee referred to Article 17 of the political parties law, which enabled it to suspend the activities of a party, as a means of stopping any decision or act by a party that is contrary to the higher interests of the country. The committee attributed its decision to the split within the party ranks, with one group led by Hamdi Ahmad, a member of the party’s executive committee, and the other led by Ahmad Idris. The Committee, in its decision, referred to the official complaint brought by the those members concerning the selection of a new party chair. The two party members also asked for Al-sha'b to be suspended from publication and a freeze to be put on the party’s bank account. Labor Party chairman Ibrahim Shoukry described these demands as illegal.

The platform of the Labor Party called for:

    * Establishing an economic system based on the Islamic Shari'ah
    * Protecting the national industries
    * Equal distribution of investments among the Egyptian governorates
    * Achieving unity between Egypt, Sudan and Libya
    * Liberating the occupied Palestinian lands
    * Promoting ties with developing countries


Socialist Labor Party of Egypt see Labor Party of Egypt.


Ladane
Ladane (Ladano).  In Brazil, the assistant of the high master of worship in the Muslim religion; an acolyte of the imam. 
Ladano see Ladane


Lahoud, Emile
Lahoud, Emile (Emile Lahoud) (Emile Jamil Lahoud) (b. January 12, 1936). Lebanese military leader, politician and president. 

Émile Jamil Lahoud was a former President of Lebanon and a Maronite-Catholic. Under Lebanon's unwritten constitutional agreement, the National Pact, the presidency is earmarked for a Maronite Catholic, the parliament speaker's post for a Shiite Muslim and the prime minister's post is reserved for a Sunni Muslim.

He was the son of General Jamil Lahoud, a leader in the independence movement. His mother was of Armenian descent from the Armenian village of Kasab.

Emile Lahoud was born on January 12, 1936, in Baabdat as the son of a general.  His father was one of the central figures in the independence fight in the 1940s.  In 1956, Lahoud joined the Military Academy to start his military career. 

In 1959, Lahoud graduated from the Military Academy with the rank of lieutenant.  In 1966, he became the commander of the Second Fleet. 

In 1967, Lahoud married Andree Amadouny.  They would eventually have three children.

In 1968, Lahoud became the commander of the First Fleet.

In 1972, Lahoud moved to the United States to pursue his military education at the United States Naval Command College in Rhode Island.  Lahoud would return to the United States again in 1973, 1979 and 1980. 

In 1989, with the conflict between Michel Aoun and the parliament forces, Lahoud supported Aoun.  Lahoud even tried to get Aoun’s help to get Syrian backing for a presidential bid.   However, in September, Aoun fired Lahoud for incompetence.   Lahoud then moved into the Syrian controlled parts of Beirut.  On November 28, 1989, Lahoud was appointed Commander of the Armed Forces, after many other candidates had turned down the offer.  He became central in the stabilization process towards the end of the Lebanese Civil War.

In the 1990s, Lahoud exerted a strong influence on rebuilding the Lebanese army.  This involves the introduction of compulsory military service for Lebanese men and the acquisition of equipment from the United States.  However, he also allowed Syrian influence to the extent that Damascus was able to overrule decisions of the highest officials in the army.

On October 15, 1998, Lahoud was elected president by a unanimous National Assembly, a unanimity made possible when Walid Jumblatt and his supporters boycotted the assembly.  Aoun also protested against the appointment.   On November 24, 1998, Lahoud took office, assuming powers that had been stripped from the presidency by the Ta’if Accord of 1989.  His presidency got off to a rough start, as prime minister Rafiq Hariri refused to form a new government.  In December, Lahoud appointed Selim al-Hoss to be the new prime minister.

In March of 1999, on the orders of Lahoud, Lebanese security forces stormed university campuses where students protested against the Syrian presence in Lebanon.

In 2000, parliamentary elections made the groups of Hariri and Jumblatt far stronger.  Hariri returned as prime minister, in a stronger position towards Lahoud compared to the 1998 situation.  In October, Lahoud was to give a speech at an Arab summit meeting in Cairo, Egypt.  However, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was too late approving it.  Lahoud ended up giving a one minute improvised speech.

In August of 2001, Lahoud launched massive arrests of national dissidents.

Under the Lebanese constitution, the President's term was limited to one six-year term. However, under continued pressure from Syria, in 2004, the parliament voted to extend his term for an additional three years to 2007.
 
Despite great expectations from Christians and nationalists, Lahoud proved to be a weak leader, and was best defined as a Syrian puppet.  Although Lahoud exercised more power over the decision making of the government than the prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, nevertheless, behind him the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, gave instructions both to Lahoud as well as to other forces in Lebanon that Lahoud relied upon. 

Lahoud was behind many acts of suppression against those demonstrating against the Syrian presence in Lebanon, leading to much discontent with him.  Lahoud’s rise to power was due to the contacts and position of his father, Jamil, had built, first through the independence fight of Lebanon in the early 1940s, then as a politician in the 1960s. 

Prior to being elected president, the descriptions on Lahoud’s personal qualities varied much.  According to his military colleagues, on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War, he was unusually timid.  When fighting became heavy, Lahoud sequestered himself in the basement of Al-Manar Hotel in Jounieh.  

However, following the civil war, Lahoud showed great courage.  He was efficient as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, and was successful in rebuilding its structure and strength.  He was also known for his firm stance on corruption. 

Most important to his rise to power were his good relations with both Syria and the United States.  Syria expected him to be effective in gaining support from the Lebanese Christians, and weakened the powers of the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, who they thought had become too strong in Lebanese politics.

Many leading politicians of Lebanon had positive expectations of him.  In order to have him elected, the Constitution was changed with regards to requiring the senior civil servants wait two years before accepting a political office.  This change was made with the support of Lebanese politicians and with pressure from Syria.

He married Andrée Amdouni and they had three children: Emile, Ralf and Karine who was married to Lebanon's defense minister Elias Murr,


Emile Lahoud see Lahoud, Emile
Emile Jamil Lahoud see Lahoud, Emile


Lahut and Nasut
Lahut and Nasut. Two terms meaning divinity (or deity) and humanity, and forming a pair which plays an important role in the theology of certain Muslim mystics and in the theosophical conceptions of the extremist Shi‘a..

Alam-i Lahut ("Realm of Divinity") is the realm where incalculable unseen tiny dots emerge and expand to such large circles that they engulf the entire universe.  This Realm is also known as Tajalliat ("The Beatific Vision" or "The Circle of the Beatific Vision").  These countless circles are the bases of all the root causes of the universe.  This whole circle is known as the Ghaib-ul-ghaib ("Unseen of the Unseen").  Alam-i Lahut has similarities to the Christian concept of Deus revelatus ("Revealed God"), the Hindu notion of Saguna Brahma ("Qualified Absolute"), and the Kabbalist idea of Kether ("The Crown of the Tree of Life").  The final boundary of human knowledge and understanding is called Hijab-e-Mehmood ("The Extolled Veil"), which is the extreme height of the Arsh ("Supreme Empyrean").  Nehr-e-tasweed ("The Channel of Darkness") whose last limit is in the Realm of Divinity, is the basis of the Unseen and feeds Rooh-e-Azam ("The Great Soul").

Alam-i Nasut ("Realm of Humanity") is the realm when foundations of the tangible world of matter are laid.  It includes the material realm and all the normally visible cosmos.  Nehr-e-Tazheer ("Channel of Manifestation"), whose last limit is Alam-i Nasut, feeds the subtleties of ego.  The Realm of Humanity is supervised by one Kitab-al-Mubeen controlling: 

300 million Loh-e-Mehfooz (Superclusters), each one controlling:

80 thousand Hazeere (galaxies), each one containing:

13 billion star systems, out of which

1 billion star systems have life on one of their planets.

On every planet with life on it, life exists in three different planes of existence, the Plane of Angels, the Plane of Jinn, and the Plane of Humans.  Additionally, on each planet there is another realm known as Alam-e-Araf or Barzakh (Astral Plane), where humans go after they die (when the soul disconnects from the physical body).  Humans can also visit the astral realm during sleep (while dreaming) or during meditation.

 
Nasut see Lahut and Nasut.


Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim (Abu’l-Qasim Lahuti) (Abolqasem Lahouti) (Abolqāsem Lahūtī) (Abulqasim Lahuti) (Abulqosim Lohuti) (1887 - March 16, 1957).  Persian Communist poet and revolutionary of Kirmanshah.  He has been rightly acclaimed as one of the founders of Soviet Tajik poetry.

Born in Kirmanshah to a poet by the name of Mirza Ahmad Elhami, Lahuti's first poem was printed in the newspaper Habal al-Mateen in Calcutta when Lahuti was eighteen.  Initially, he went to clerical school, but then went to Bulgaria and wrote many poems on Islam. He then went back to Iran, and enlisted in the army, where he reached the rank of captain.

After being sentenced to death by a court in Qom, Lahuti fled to Turkey.  However, he soon returned and joined forces with Sheikh Mohammad Khiabani in Tabriz. His forces defeated Mahmud Khan Puladeen's troops, but were soon disbanded by freshly dispatched forces.  Lahuti then fled to Baku.

While living in Nakhichevan, Lahuti became interested in Communism. After marrying a Russian poet by the name of Sisil Banu, being unable to initiate a coup d'etat against the central government of Iran, he gave up and move to the Soviet Union where he remained until his final days.

In 1925, Lahuti went to Dushanbe and joined the friends of Sadriddin Aini.  His poetry was welcomed by audiences and gained him the position of the founder of the Soviet Tajik poetry.  Lahuti is the author of the Tajikistan national anthem.  His other works include "Kovai Ohingar" ("Kaveh the Blacksmith", 1947), "Qasidai Kremel" ("Ode to the Kremlin", 1923), and "Toj va Bairaq" ("The Crown and the Flag", 1935).  His collection of poetry in six volumes was published between 1960 to 1963.

Abu'l-Qasim Lahuti died on March 16, 1957 in Moscow.


Abu'l-Qasim Lahuti see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Abolqasem Lahouti see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Lahouti, Abolqasem see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Founder of Soviet Tajik Poetry see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Author of the Tajikistan National Anthem see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim
Abulqosim Lohuti see Lahuti, Abu’l-Qasim


Lak
Lak. There are two references to the Lak:

(1)  The Lak are the most southern group of Kurd tribes in Persia, from which the Zand dynasty arose. 

(2)  The Lak are an ethnic group who lived in Dagestan, mostly in the central mountainous regions. In 1944, a part of the Lak were moved to the plains to replace the deported Chechen population. They speak the Lak language which has seven different dialects.  It was written with the Arabic alphabet from the fifteenth century until 1928.  Then it was written with the Latin alphabet for a decade.  Since 1938, the Cyrillic alphabet has been used

Laks, self designation – Lak. Native language – Lak. It was written with the arabic alphabet from the 15th century until 1928. Then it was written with the latin alphabet for about a decade. Since 1938, the cyrillic alphabet has been used. Historical capital of laks is Kumukh (in lakian «Gumuchi», as well as «Gumuk»), which was the cultural and religions centre of Dagestan. Located in the central mountainous region of Southern Dagestan. Laks are an ethnic group numbering about 170,000 of which approximately 140,000 live in Dagestan.


Lakhm
Lakhm (Banu Lakhm) (Lakhmids).  Arab tribe, especially influential in the pre-Islamic period.  The term “Lakhmi” became a title of honor.  The Banu Lakhm trace their lineage back to Qahtan, who created an Arab kingdom in Al-Hira, near modern Kufa, Iraq.  The Lakhmi kingdom served as a buffer between Arabia and the Persian Empire, preventing Bedouin Arab tribes from infiltrating Persian lands.

The Lakhmids formed a pre-Islamic Arab dynasty of Iraq that made al-Hira its capital and ruled it from around 300 until 600.  They were Sasanian clients and semi-independent kings.  The Lakhmids were prominent before the arrival of Islam and historically the Lakhmids were usually allied with the Sasanids.

The Lakhmids, Banu Lakhm, Muntherids, were a group of Arab Christians who lived in Southern Iraq, and made al-Hirah their capital in 266. Poets described it as a Paradise on earth, an Arab Poet described the city's pleasant climate and beauty "One day in al-Hirah is better than a year of treatment". The al-Hirah ruins are located 3 kilometers south of Kufa, on the west bank of the Euphrates.

The Lakhmid Kingdom was founded by the Lakhum tribe that emigrated from Yemen in the second century and ruled by the Banu Lakhm, hence the name given it. The founder of the dynasty was 'Amr, whose son Imru' al-Qais (not to be confused with the famous poet Imru' al-Qais who lived in the 6th century) converted to Christianity. Gradually the whole city converted to that faith.

Imru' al-Qais dreamt of a unified and independent Arab kingdom and, following that dream, he seized many cities in Arabia. He then formed a large army and developed the Kingdom as a naval power, which consisted of a fleet of ships operating along the Bahraini coast. From this position he attacked the coastal cities of Iran (Persia) - which at that time was in civil war, due to a dispute as to the succession - even raiding the birthplace of the Sassanid kings, the province of Pars (Fars).

In 325, the Persians, led by Shapur II, began a campaign against the Arab kingdoms. When Imru' al-Qais realized that a mighty Persian army composed of 60,000 warriors was approaching his kingdom, he asked for the assistance of the Roman Empire. Constantius II promised to assist him but was unable to provide that help when it was needed. The Persians advanced toward al-Hirah and a series of vicious battles took place over al-Hirah and the surrounding cities.

Shapur II crushed the Lakhmid army and captured al-Hirah. He ordered the extermination of its population in retaliation of their raids on Pars. In this, the young Shapur acted much more violently than was normal at the time in order to demonstrate to both the Arab Kingdoms and the Persian nobility his power and authority. Shapur's title in Arabic is Zol 'Aktāf meaning owner of the shoulders, as he pierced the shoulders of his captives and chained them to each other by a rope. He installed Aus ibn Qallam and gave the city autonomy, thus making the kingdom a buffer zone between the Persian Empire's mainland and the territory of other Arabs in the Peninsula.

Imru' al-Qais escaped to Bahrain, taking his dream of a unified Arab nation with him, and then to Syria seeking the promised assistance from Constantius II which never materialised, so he stayed there until he died. With him ended the dream of a united Arab kingdom until after the advent of Islam. When he died he was entombed at al-Nimarah in the Syrian desert.

Imru' al-Qais' funerary inscription is written in an extremely difficult type of script. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the inscription, and controversy has arisen over its precise implications. It is now certain that Imru' al-Qais claimed the title "King of all the Arabs" and also claimed in the inscription to have campaigned successfully over the entire north and centre of the peninsula, as far as the border of Najran.

Two years after his death, in the year 330, a revolt took place where Aus ibn Qallam was killed and succeeded by the son of Imru' al-Qais, 'Amr. Thereafter, the Lakhmids' main rivals were the Ghassanids, who were vassals of the Sassanids' arch-enemy, the Byzantine Empire. The Lakhmid kingdom was a major centre of the Nestorian sect of Christianity which was nurtured by the Sassanids, as it opposed the Orthodox religion of Byzantium.

The Lakhmids remained influential throughout the 6th century. Nevertheless, in 602, the last Lakhmid king, Nu'man III, was put to death by the Sassanid king Khosrau II because of a false suspicion of treason, and the Lakhmid kingdom was annexed. Islam overran the Sassanid Empire in the 7th century. At that point, the city was abandoned and its materials were used to re-construct Kufa, its exhausted twin city.

It is now widely believed that the annexation of the Lakhmid kingdom was one of the main factors behind the Fall of Sassanid dynasty to the Muslim Arabs and the Islamic conquest of Persia, as the Lakhmids agreed to act as spies for the Muslims after being defeated in the Battle of Hira by Khalid ibn al-Walid.

'The Battle of Dhi Qar' was a Pre-Islamic battle fought between Arabs in southern Iraq and a Persian army, around 609.

According to the Arab historian Abu 'Ubaida (d. 824), Khosrau II was angry with King Numan III for refusing to give him his daughter in marriage, and therefore imprisoned him. Subsequently, Khosrau sent troops to recover the Numan family armor, but Hany bin Masud (Numan's friend) refused, and the Persian forces were defeated at the battle of Dhi Qar, near Al-Hirah, the Lakhmid dynasty's capital. Hirah, sometimes spelled "Hira," was just south of the Iraqi city of Kufa.

Some of notable Lakhmid Kingdom facts are:

    * al-Hirah was the cradle of the Arabic alphabet.
    * It was the birthplace of famous poets like al-Nabighah al-Thubyani, Laqete ibn Ya'amur al-Ayadi, 'Alqama ibn 'Abada and Uday ibn Zaid al-Abbadi. It was visited by other great poets like Tarafah ibn al-'Abd, Amr ibn Kulthum (who killed 'Amr III).
    * The Sassanid army along with al-Mundhir IV himself and his army defeated the famed Byzantine general Belisarius twice: at the Battle of Edessa (530), and Battle of Callinicum (531).
    * After the death of Nu'man III, Arabs defeated the Persians in the Battle of Thi-Qar.
    * Lakhmids sometimes had good relations with Persians. Bahram V lived in Al-Hirah and was educated at the court of al-Mundhir I, whose support helped him gain the throne after the assassination of his father.

The Lakhmids Kings were:

1  'Amr ibn Adi                                                  268–295
2  Imru' al-Qays ibn 'Amr                                  295–328
3  'Amr ibn Imru' al-Qays                                  328–363
4  Aws ibn Qallam                                                  363–368
5  Imru' al-Qays ibn 'Amr                                  368–390
6  Nu'man ibn Imru' al-Qays                                  390–418
7  al-Mundhir ibn Nu'man                                  418–462
8  al-Aswad ibn al-Mundhir                                  462–490
9  al-Mundhir ibn al-Mundhir                                  490–497
10  Nu'man ibn al-Aswad                                          497–503
11  Abu Yaffar ibn Alqama                                  503–507
12  Imru' al-Qays ibn Nu'man                                  507–514
13  al-Mundhir ibn Imru' al-Qays                          514–554
14  'Amr ibn al-Mundhir                                          554–569
15  Qaboos ibn al-Mundhir                                  569–577
16  Feshart                                                          577–578
17  al-Mundhir ibn al-Mundhir                                  578–582
18  Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir                                  582–609
19  Eyas ibn Kabisa                                                  609–618
20  Azadbeh "Persian Governor" <- Islamic conquest  618-633



Banu Lakhm see Lakhm
Lakhmids see Lakhm


Lakhmids
Lakhmids.  See Lakhm.


Lamaholot
Lamaholot (Ata Kiwan) (Holo) (Solor) (Solorese) (Solot).  Nearly all the people who live in the Solor Islands and the eastern portion of Flores -- called the East Flores Regency in the Indonesian province of East Southeast Islands -- speak Lamaholot, the name of the language and their ethnic designation.  Lamaholot Muslims are Sunni and follow the Shafi school of law.  The Dutch called them Solorese after the Solor Island, the smallest, driest and most impoverished of the islands in the archipelago, which includes Adonara and Lembata.

Long before Islam became established on Java and elsewhere in Indonesia, Muslims had brought their religion to the Lamaholot.  A Jesuit, Father Baltasar Diaz, who visited Solor in 1559, discovered there a mosque and many Muslims.  In 1561, Portuguese Dominicans opened a mission on Solor and erected a palisade on lontar palm trunks as protection against the Muslims.  In 1563, a fleet, said to be Java Muslims, attacked and burned the palisade, but the fortuitous arrival of a Portuguese galleon, which surprised their boats, saved the priests.  This stroke of good fortune so impressed the Lamaholot that many of them abandoned Islam and became Christians.

Prior to the coming of the Portuguese, the Lamaholot had been influenced by Hindu Javanese.  A Majapahit fleet conquered Larantuka, Flores, in 1357, and the Negarakertagama listed Solor as a Majapahit dependency.  In the sixteenth century some Lamaholot recognized the suzerainty of the Sultan of Ternate, and on at least one occasion they sent him envoys requesting military assistance.  The straight between Solor and Adonara is narrow, shallow and protected from the winds.  It was a favorite harbor, especially during the storms of December and through March at the height of the wet monsoon, for ships trading in sandalwood and beeswax acquired principally on Timor.  The ships could remain safe while awaiting calmer winds.  Before the Portuguese took control of the sandalwood trade, it was plied by Malays, Javanese, Chinese, Indians, Arabs and others.  During the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries, the harbor and the access it provided to sandalwood gave the Lamaholot region a relative importance which it has never again held.

In 1566, the Portuguese erected a stone fort at Lohayong (Lawayong), Solor, and soon had converted several thousand persons to Catholicism, including the villages of Lamakera, Solor, and Lamahala, Adonara.  The Muslim village of Trong, Adonara, attacked its neighbor, Lamahala, in 1590.  Thereafter, Lamahala became and remained Muslim.  In 1598, villagers at Lohayong and Lamakera temporarily overthrew their Portuguese masters, but in re-establishing themselves the following year, the Portuguese burned Lamakera to the ground.  The 2,000 former Christians of Lamakera soon rebuilt their village, and thereafter they adhered to Islam.  So, too, did the young man who succeeded to the principal position of leadership among the Lamaholot, Kaichil Partani, known as Dom Diogo.  However, he did not do so openly until the Dutch captured the fort from the Portuguese in 1613.

Eventually, the Portuguese retired to Larntuka, Flores, but retained influence on east Solor and parts of Adonara.  For most of the seventeenth century and later, the Portuguese and Dutch faced each other in the region in a relative stalemate.  One party or another on several occasions burned, plundered or sometimes abandoned the fort, and the Dutch twice took it from the Portuguese.  Two severe earthquakes devastated the fort in 1648, and it ceased to have real importance, although the structure still stands.  In 1653, the Dutch shifted the center of their interest to Timor.

The split between the two European powers eventually coincided with a division in the Lamaholot community.  There were two groups, Demonara and Pajinara, descendants of two mythical brothers named Demon and Paji.  Each lived in different villages and were set against each other by a fissure of hatred passed on from generation to generation.  Their villages were distributed in an irregular pattern across the four islands, being mixed among each other in places on Adonara by dividing Solor roughly in half, Demon to the east, Paji to the west.  Those called Pajinara (today usually simply Paji) either retained traditional Lamaholot religious forms or adopted Islam.  The Demonara (today, Demon) frequently accepted Christianity.

Ironically, the Portuguese first established themselves among the Paji and tried to convert them.  When these reverted to Islam the Portuguese found themselves supported by the Demon.  The Dutch were left with an uneasy alliance with the predominantly Muslim Paji.  For a variety of reasons, the Portuguese and Dutch were not particularly active in this part of Indonesia during the eighteenth century.  In 1859,the Portuguese ceded their rights in the Solor Archipelago to the Dutch as part of a general regulation of the holdings of these powers in the vicinity, much to the anguish of the Raja of Larantuka, who did not regard himself and his people as property subject to sale.

Through a series of military actions toward the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Dutch established for the first time direct control throughout the islands. Subsequently, they consolidated Paji villages under the Raja of Adonara and Demon villages under the Raja of Larantuka.  The structure in which all groups are part of the same regency does not recognize the division, and the government takes steps to diminish the confrontaion. 

Conversion to Islam and Christianity greatly increased in the twentieth century, with both sides stepping up their efforts at proselytizing.  There are now many villages, especially Lambeta, where both religions are represented.  Nevertheless many people, particularly in more remote communities, have resisted efforts to convert them from more traditional means of religious expression.  In some villages as many as a third of the population may keep to the older practices.




Solorese see Lamaholot
Ata Kiwan  see Lamaholot
Holo see Lamaholot
Solor see Lamaholot
Solot see Lamaholot


Lam, Banu
Lam, Banu (Banu Lam).  Numerous and formerly powerful Arab tribe living on the borders of Iran and Iraq.  The Banu Lam are an Arab tribe of central Arabia and southern Iraq. The tribe claimed descent from the ancient Arab tribe of Tayy, and dominated the western Nejd (the region between Medina and al-Yamama) before the fifteenth century of the Christian calendar.  The tribe split into three main Bedouin (nomadic) groups: the Fudhool, the Al Kathir, and the al-Mughira.  The Bani Lam tribes gradually left the Nejd, settling mostly in southern Iraq, where they converted from Sunni to Shi'a Islam.  Many clans from Bani Lam, however, remained in the Nejd as settled townspeople.  The Fudhool were the last of Bani Lam to leave the Nejd, in the eighteenth century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, all members of the Banu Lam spoke Arabic, but a minority also knew and used Persian.  The great majority are Shi‘a.  In the eighteenth century, they joined forces with Nadir Shah Afshar.  Many punitive military expeditions were organized against them by the Ottomans.  They retained in general a position of autonomy between the Ottoman Empire and Persia.


Banu Lam see Lam, Banu


Lamech
Lamech (in Arabic, Lamak).  In Genesis 9:21, the invention of music is attributed to Jubal, son of Lamech, but various Arabic sources give primacy to Lamak, the sixth generation descendant of Cain.

Lamech is a character in the genealogies of Adam in the Book of Genesis. One is the seventh generation descendant of Cain (Genesis 4:18); his father was named Methusael and he was responsible for the "Song of the Sword." He is also noted as the first polygamist mentioned in the Bible, taking two wives, Ada and Tselah. He is not to be confused with the Lamech in Genesis 5.



Lamak see Lamech


Lami‘i, Shaykh Mahmud
Lami‘i, Shaykh Mahmud (Shaykh Mahmud Lami‘i) (1472-1531). Ottoman Sufi writer and poet.  He introduced fresh themes into Turkish literature.  Of his works, about thirty titles are known.
Shaykh Mahmud Lami'i see Lami‘i, Shaykh Mahmud


Laminu Njitiya
Laminu Njitiya (d. 1871). Adviser to Shehu ‘Umar and effective ruler of the Kanuri state of Bornu.  Laminu Njitiya was of Shuwu Arab and Kanembu descent.  He began his career as a bandit.  However, he later became a part of a noble household.  It was while he was a part of this noble household that Laminu became the first assistant to Shehu ‘Umar’s chief adviser.  Shehu ‘Umar was a weak and indecisive man.  He was deposed in 1853 but regained the throne in 1854.  Because Laminu had remained loyal to ‘Umar, ‘Umar rewarded Laminu with a large fief and an untitled position as his most trusted confidant.  In this position, and because of ‘Umar’s weak personality, Laminu became the de facto ruler of Bornu. Laminu was a highly popular figure.  He increased Bornu’s holding by conquering some of the Marghai country to the south.  After Laminu’s death, Bukar, ‘Umar’s son and successor, became the de facto ruler of the Kanuri state of Bornu.
Njitiya, Laminu see Laminu Njitiya


Lamtuna
Lamtuna.  Berber tribe belonging to the branch of the Sanhaja.  They already formed a considerable kingdom in the eighth century, and became Muslims, at first only nominally, in the ninth century.  The Lamtuna are from a region of Mauritania-Western Sahara-Morocco-Algeria.  The Lamtuna claim descent from Himyar, a state in ancient Southern Arabia.  The Almoravids, the founders of Marrakech in Morocco, are descendants of this tribe.

The Lamtuna are a Berber tribe from the region of Mauritania-Western Sahara-Morocco-Algeria. They claim descent from Himyar, one of the South Arabian eponyms. The Almoravids, the founders of Marrakech in Morocco where they established their capital, originated from this tribe.


Lamtuni, Abu Bakr al-Sanhaji al-
Lamtuni, Abu Bakr al-Sanhaji al- (Abu Bakr al-Sanhaji al-Lamtuni) (d. 1075).  War leader of the Almoravids and, above all, the real founder of Marrakesh.
Abu Bakr al-Sanhaji al-Lamtuni see Lamtuni, Abu Bakr al-Sanhaji al-


Laq
Laq.  Muslim people of the Caucasus.  Their final conversion to Islam occurred in the thirteenth century.


Lari, Muhammad ibn Salah al-
Lari, Muhammad ibn Salah al- (Muhammad ibn Salah al-Lari) (Muslih al-Din) (c.1510-1572). Persian scholar and historian.  He wrote on philosophy and astronomy, on the Qur’an and hadith, and composed a widely-known universal history.
Muhammad ibn Salah al-Lari see Lari, Muhammad ibn Salah al-
Muslih al-Din see Lari, Muhammad ibn Salah al-
Din, Muslih al- see Lari, Muhammad ibn Salah al-


Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LT) (Lashkar-e-Taiba) (Lashkar-i-Tayyaba) (Lashkar-e-Tayyaba) (Lashkar-i-Taiba) (Lashkar Taiba) (LeT) (Army of the Righteous) (Army of the Pure) (Army of the Good).  The LT is the armed wing of the Pakistan based religious organization, Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI) -- a Sunni anti-United States missionary organization formed in 1989.  One of the three largest and best-trained groups fighting in Kashmir against India, it is not connected to a political party.  The LT leader is MDI chief, Professor Hafiz Mohammed Saeed.  Almost all LT cadres are foreigners -- mostly Pakistanis from seminaries across the country and Afghan veterans of the Afghan wars.  The LT trains its mobile training camps across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Afghanistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the largest and most active Islamist militant organizations in South Asia. It was founded by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and Zafar Iqbal in Afghanistan. It is currently based in Muridke[citation needed] (near Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan) and operates several training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Lashkar-e-Taiba members have carried out major attacks against India and its objective is to introduce an Islamic state in South Asia and to "liberate" Muslims residing in Indian Kashmir. The organization is banned as a terrorist organization by India, Pakistan, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia and Australia. As of December 2008 U.S. intelligence officials believed that Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), continued to give LT intelligence help and protection.


LT see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Army of the Righteous see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Army of the Pure see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Lashkar-i-Tayyaba see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Lashkar-e-Tayyaba see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba
Lashkar-i-Taiba see Lashkar-e-Tayyiba


Lat, al-
Lat, al- (Allat).  Pre-Islamic solar deity, frequently invoked by tribal poets. The deep attachment felt by the Banu Thaqif towards al-Lat, by the Aws and the Khazraj towards Manat, and by the Quraysh towards al-‘Uzza, constituted the greatest obstacle in the path of the peaceful implantation of Islam in the regions of the Hijaz.  Among Muhammad’s tribesmen, the Quraysh, she was so highly esteemed that a divine revelation was needed to affirm that Lat, together with two other goddesses, al-‘Uzza and Manat, were not to be approached as intercessors before Allah, the Almighty Creator of the Universe.

Allāt or Al-Lāt was a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess who was one of the three chief goddesses of Mecca. She is mentioned in the Qur'an (Sura 53:19), which indicates that pre-Islamic Arabs considered her as one of the daughters of Allāh along with Manāt and al-‘Uzzá.


 
Allat see Lat, al-


Lat Dyor Diop
Lat Dyor Diop (Lat Dior) (Lat Dior Ngone Latyr Diop) (c. 1842-1886).  Ruler of the Wolof kingdom of Kayor (1862-1864 and 1871-1882).  Because Lat Dyor Diop’s mother was of Kayor royal blood, Lat Dyor was eligible for the kingship and was chosen in 1862.  Two years later, after coming into conflict with French imperial forces, Lat Dyor was forced to flee to Saloum, where he took refuge with the Muslim leader Maba Diakhou Ba.  At the time, Maba Diakhou Ba was fighting both the French and local non-Muslims.  While with Maba Diakhou Ba, Lat Dyor converted to Islam.  Maba was killed in 1867.  After Maba’s death, Lat Dyor came to terms with the French.  Returning to Kayor, Lat Dyor was reinstated as the ruler of the Wolof kingdom in 1871.  In 1875, Lat Dyor allied with the French against Ahmadu ibn ‘Umar Tall, who was struggling to maintain the Tukolor empire against the French.  In 1877, Lat Dyor won control over the neighboring state of Baol.  His power and position enabled him to affect the Islamization of a large segment of western Senegal.  In 1882, Lat Dyor was again pitted against the French when they began to build a railway through Kayor to connect St. Louis with Dakar.  Realizing the threat to his sovereignty, Lat Dyor refused the French passage, and was again forced to flee.  Lat Dyor fought the French sporadically until he was killed in 1886.

Lat Dior Ngoné Latyr Diop, son of Sakhéwère Sokhna Mbaye and the Linguère royal Ngoné Latyr Fall, was a 19th century Damel (king) of Cayor, a Wolof state that is today in south central Sénégal.

A great resistance hero of Senegalese history, famed for his defiance and battles against the French, Lat Dior was deposed twice, in 1869 and 1879.

Lat Dior converted to Islam around 1861, and made common cause with other Wolof and Fulani states to resist French colonialism. Instrumental in his conversion was the Almamy of Saloum, Maba Diakhou Bâ. An ally of the Toucouleur empire's El Hadj Umar Tall, Maba convinced Lat-Dior both to convert, and to aid non-Wolof Islamic states of the region against their common foes.

Dior led his troops beside Maba in the battle of Rip on November 30, 1865, at the battle of Pathé Badiane in 1864 and Ngol Ngol in 1865. With Lat Dior, Maba took part in the conquests of the states of Sine, Baol and Djolof.

At Kaolack in 1865, they combined forces with soldiers from Waalo, Ndiambour and Ndiander to face the French fortifications of governor Émile Pinet-Laprade but were repulsed.

After the French conquered Waalo, (re-appointed) governor Louis Faidherbe invaded Cayor in 1865 in order to stop the Damel's opposition to the construction of the Dakar to Saint-Louis railway. Dior is reported to have told the later French Governor Servatius:

"As long as I live, be assured, I shall oppose, with all my might the construction of this railway."

However, the French defeated Lat Dior's forces at the battle of Dekheule on October 26, 1868, after Faidherbe's retirement. Lat Dior struck a deal for limited autonomy and re-installment in 1871. In response to further French expansion, Cayor rose up again with Dior at their head, only to be defeated and be annexed again in 1879.

The Cayor kingdom was extinguished in its entirety October 6, 1886.

Faidherbe is reputed to have said of Dior's troops: "Ceux-là, on les tue on ne les déshonore pas." ("They can be killed but not dishonored"). This has been adapted as the motto of the Senegalese Army: "On nous tue, on ne nous déshonore pas".

In Dakar there is a giant statue of Maalaw, the legendary horse of Lat Dior, near the great mosque.

Lat Dior see Lat Dyor Diop
Diop, Lat Dyor see Lat Dyor Diop
Lat Dior Ngone Latyr Diop see Lat Dyor Diop
Dior, Lat see Lat Dyor Diop
Diop, Lat Dior Ngone Latyr see Lat Dyor Diop

 Lateef, Yusef

Yusef Abdul Lateef (born William Emanuel Huddleston, October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and educator. He became a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community after his conversion to the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam in 1950.
Although Lateef's main instruments were the tenor saxophone and flute, he also played oboe and bassoon, both rare in jazz, and also used a number of non-western instruments such as the bamboo flute, shanai, shofar, xun, arghul and koto. He is known for having been an innovator in the blending of jazz with "Eastern" music.
Lateef wrote and published a number of books including two novellas entitled A Night in the Garden of Love and Another Avenue, the short story collections Spheres and Rain Shapes, along with his autobiography, The Gentle Giant, written in collaboration with Herb Boyd. Along with his record label YAL Records, Lateef owned Fana Music, a music publishing company. Lateef published his own work through Fana, which includes Yusef Lateef's Flute Book of the Blues and many of his own orchestral compositions.

Lateef was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His family moved, in 1923, to Lorain, Ohio and again in 1925, to Detroit, Michigan, where his father changed the family's name to "Evans".
Throughout his early life, Lateef came into contact with many Detroit-based jazz musicians who went on to gain prominence, including vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Elvin Jones and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Lateef was a proficient saxophonist by the time of his graduation from high school at the age of 18, when he launched his professional career and began touring with a number of swing bands.
In 1949, he was invited by Dizzy Gillespie to tour with his orchestra. In 1950, Lateef returned to Detroit and began his studies in composition and flute at Wayne State University. It was during this period that he converted to Islam and became a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Lateef began recording as a leader in 1957 for Savoy Records, a non-exclusive association which continued until 1959. The earliest of Lateef's album's for the Prestige subsidiary New Jazz overlap with them. Musicians such as Wilbur Harden (trumpet, flugelhorn), bassist Herman Wright, drummer Frank Gant, and pianist Hugh Lawson were among his collaborators during this period.
By 1961, with the recording of Into Something and Eastern Sounds, Lateef's dominant presence within a group context had emerged. His 'Eastern' influences are clearly audible in all of these recordings, with spots for instruments like the rahab, shanai, arghul, koto and a collection of Chinese wooden flutes and bells along with his tenor and flute. Even his use of the western oboe sounds exotic in this context; it is not a standard jazz instrument. Indeed, the tunes themselves are a mixture of jazz standards, blues and film music usually performed with a piano/bass/drums rhythm section in support. Lateef made numerous contributions to other people's albums including his time as a member of saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's Quintet during 1962–64.
Lateef's sound has been claimed to have been a major influence on the saxophonist John Coltrane, whose later period free jazz recordings contain similarly 'Eastern' traits. For a time (1963–66) Lateef was signed to Coltrane's label, Impulse. He had a regular working group during this period, with trumpeter Richard Williams and Mike Nock on piano.
In the late 1960s, Lateef began to incorporate contemporary soul and gospel phrasing into his music, still with a strong blues underlay, on albums such as Detroit and Hush'n'Thunder. Lateef expressed a dislike of the terms "jazz" and "jazz musician" as musical generalizations. As is so often the case with such generalizations, the use of these terms do understate the breadth of his sound. For example, in the 1980s, Lateef experimented with new age and spiritual elements.
In 1960, Lateef again returned to school, studying flute at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. He received a Bachelor's Degree in Music in 1969 and a Master's Degree in Music Education in 1970. Starting in 1971, he taught courses in autophysiopsychic music at the Manhattan School of Music, and he became an associate professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 1972.
In 1975, Lateef completed his dissertation on Western and Islamic education and earned a Ed.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the early 1980s, Lateef was a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Nigerian Cultural Studies at Ahmadu Bello University in the city of Zaria, Nigeria. Returning to the United States in 1986 he took a joint teaching position at the University of Massachusetts and Hampshire College.
Lateef's 1987 album Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album. His core influences, however, were clearly rooted in jazz, and in his own words: "My music is jazz."
In 1992, Lateef founded YAL Records. In 1993, Lateef was commissioned by the WDR Radio Orchestra Cologne to composeThe African American Epic Suite, a four-part work for orchestra and quartet based on themes of slavery and disfranchisement in the United States. The piece has since been performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
In 2010, Lateef received the lifetime Jazz Master Fellowship Award from NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency.
The Manhattan School of Music, where Lateef earned a bachelor's and a master's degree, awarded him a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2012.

Lateef's last albums were recorded for Adam Rudolph's "Meta Records". To the end of his life, he continued to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. Lateef died on the morning of December 23, 2013 at the age of 93 after suffering from prostate cancer.

The discography of Yusef Lateef include the following:
Savoy 1957-1959
  • Jazz for the Thinker (1957)
  • Jazz Mood (1957)
  • Jazz and the Sounds of Nature (1957)
  • Prayer to the East (1957)
  • The Dreamer (1959)
  • The Fabric of Jazz (1959)
Impulse! 1963-1966
  • Jazz 'Round the World (1963)
  • Live at Pep's (1964)
  • 1984 (1965)
  • Psychicemotus (1965)
  • A Flat, G Flat and C (1966)
  • The Golden Flute (1966)
Atlantic 1967 -1991
  • The Complete Yusef Lateef (1967)
  • The Blue Yusef Lateef (1968)
  • Yusef Lateef's Detroit (1969)
  • The Diverse Yusef Lateef (1969)
  • Suite 16 (1970)
  • The Gentle Giant (1971)
  • Hush 'N' Thunder (1972)
  • Part of the Search (1973)
  • 10 Years Hence (1974)
  • The Doctor is In... and Out (1976)
  • Yusef Lateef's Little Symphony (1987)
  • Concerto for Yusef Lateef (1988)
  • Nocturnes (1989)
  • Meditations (1990)
  • Yusef Lateef's Encounters (1991)
YAL Records 1992-2002
  • Tenors of Yusef Lateef and Von Freeman (1992)
  • Heart Vision (1992)
  • Yusef Lateef Plays Ballads (1993)
  • Tenors of Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp (1993)
  • Woodwinds (1993)
  • Tenors of Yusef Lateef & Ricky Ford (1994)
  • Yusef Lateef's Fantasia for Flute (1996)
  • Full Circle (1996)
  • CHNOPS: Gold & Soul (1997)
  • Earth and Sky (1997)
  • 9 Bagatelles (1998)
  • Like the Dust (1998)
  • Live at Luckman Theater (2001)
  • Earriptus (2001)
  • So Peace (2002)
  • A Tribute Concert for Yusef Lateef: YAL's 10th Anniversary (2002)
Meta Records
  • The World at Peace (1997)
  • Beyond the Sky (2000)
  • Go: Organic Orchestra: In the Garden (2003)
  • Towards the Unknown (2010)
  • Voice Prints (2013)
Other labels
  • Before Dawn: The Music of Yusef Lateef (Verve, 1957)
  • The Sounds of Yusef (Prestige, 1957)
  • Other Sounds (New Jazz, 1957)
  • Lateef at Cranbrook (Argo, 1958)
  • Cry! - Tender (New Jazz, 1959)
  • The Three Faces of Yusef Lateef (Riverside, 1960)
  • The Centaur and the Phoenix (Riverside, 1960)
  • Lost in Sound (Charlie Parker, 1961)
  • Eastern Sounds (Moodsville, 1961)
  • Into Something (New Jazz, 1961)
  • Autophysiopsychic (1977, CTI Records)
  • In a Temple Garden (1979, CTI Records)
  • Yusef Lateef in Nigeria (Landmark, 1983)
  • Influence with Lionel and Stéphane Belmondo (2005)
  • Roots Run Deep (Rogue Art, 2012)
With Cannonball Adderley
  • The Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York (Riverside, 1962)
  • Cannonball in Europe! (Riverside, 1962)
  • Jazz Workshop Revisited (Riverside, 1962)
  • Autumn Leaves (Riverside, 1963)
  • Nippon Soul (Riverside, 1963)
With Nat Adderley
  • That's Right! (Riverside, 1960)
With Ernestine Anderson
  • My Kinda Swing (1960)
With Art Blakey
  • The African Beat (1962)
With Donald Byrd
  • Byrd Jazz (Transition, 1955)
  • First Flight (1957)
With Paul Chambers
  • 1st Bassman (1961)
With Art Farmer
  • Something You Got (CTI, 1977)
With Curtis Fuller
  • Images of Curtis Fuller (Savoy, 1960)
  • Boss of the Soul-Stream Trombone (Warwick, 1960)
  • Gettin' It Together (1961)
With Grant Green
  • Grantstand (Blue Note, 1961)
With Slide Hampton
  • Drum Suite (1962)
With Louis Hayes
  • Louis Hayes featuring Yusef Lateef & Nat Adderley (1960)
With Les McCann
  • Invitation to Openness (1972)
With Don McLean
  • Homeless Brother (1973)
With Charles Mingus
  • Pre-Bird (aka, Mingus Revisited, 1960)
With Babatunde Olatunji
  • Drums of Passion (1960)
With Sonny Red
  • Breezing (Jazzland, 1960)
With Leon Redbone
  • Double Time (Warner Bros., 1976)
With Clark Terry
  • Color Changes (1960)
With Doug Watkins
  • Soulnik (New Jazz, 1960)
With Randy Weston
  • Uhuru Afrika (Roulette, 1960)
With Frank Wess
  • Jazz Is Busting Out All Over (1957)


Latifi, ‘Abd al-Latif Celebi
Latifi, ‘Abd al-Latif Celebi (‘Abd al-Latif Celebi Latifi) (1491-1582).  Turkish biographer, litterateur and poet.  His Biographies of the Poets is generally considered, after ‘Ashiq Celebi’s, to be the second finest biographical work in Ottoman literature.
'Abd al-Latif Celebi Latifi see Latifi, ‘Abd al-Latif Celebi


Lawal
Lawal (1797-1872).  Ruler of the Fula emirate of Adamawa.  Lawal’s father, Adama, had been sanctioned by Fula revolutionary ‘Uthman dan Fodio to create the Adamawa emirate, at the southeastern limit of ‘Uthman’s empire.  When Lawal succeeded Adama in 1848, the problems Lawal faced were essentially the same as those of his father -- expansion of the emirate and suppression of rebellions.  Although Lawal was nominally under the control of ‘Uthman’s successors at Sokoto, the explorer Barth claimed that he ruled almost independently of them.  Lawal was a strict fundamentalist in matters of Islamic law; moral conduct and dress were closely regulated, and Lawal himself eschewed ostentation.  Islamic schools were opened throughout the emirate. Lawal died in 1872 and was succeeded by his brother, Sanda.


Lawata, Banu
Lawata, Banu (Banu Lawata).  Berber ethnic group who are known to live in Egypt, Barqa (Cyrenaica), Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania and Sicily.
Banu Lawata see Lawata, Banu


Lawati, Abu Muhammad ‘Abd Allah al-
Lawati, Abu Muhammad ‘Abd Allah al- (Abu Muhammad ‘Abd Allah al-Lawati).  Ibadi historian, transmitter of hadith, biographer and poet of the eleventh century.  He wrote a work on the history of the North African Ibadiyya and taught Ibadi history to numerous pupils.


Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, Thomas Edward (T. E. Lawrence) (T. E. Shaw) (Lawrence of Arabia) (born August 15, 1888, Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales—died May 19, 1935, Clouds Hill, Dorset, England). British intelligence officer who helped inspire the Arab Revolt.  T. E. Lawrence was a gifted writer and an advocate of Arab nationalism.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was known as the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia”.  He earned this title from his exploits during World War I which led helped drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. 

T. E. Lawrence, byname Lawrence Of Arabia, was British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author best known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during World War I and for his account of those activities in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).

Lawrence was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sara Maden, the governess of Sir Thomas’ daughters at Westmeath, with whom he had escaped from both marriage and Ireland. As “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple had five sons (Thomas Edward was the second) during what was outwardly a marriage with all the benefits of clergy. In 1896, the family settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials to the names) attended the High School and Jesus College. Medieval military architecture was his first interest, and he pursued it in its historical settings, studying crusader castles in France and (in 1909) in Syria and Palestine and submitting a thesis on the subject that won him first-class honors in history in 1910. (It was posthumously published, as Crusader Castles, in 1936.) As a protégé of the Oxford archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, he acquired a demyship (travelling fellowship) from Magdalen College and joined an expedition excavating the Hittite settlement of Carchemish on the Euphrates, working there from 1911 to 1914, first under Hogarth and then under Sir Leonard Woolley, and using his free time to travel on his own and get to know the language and the people. Early in 1914 he and Woolley, and Captain S.F. Newcombe, explored northern Sinai, on the Turkish frontier east of Suez. Supposedly a scientific expedition, and in fact sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund, it was more a map-making reconnaissance from Gaza to Aqaba, destined to be of almost immediate strategic value. The cover study was nevertheless of authentic scholarly significance; written by Lawrence and Woolley together, it was published as The Wilderness of Zin in 1915.

The month the war began, Lawrence became a civilian employee of the Map Department of the War Office in London, charged with preparing a militarily useful map of Sinai. By December 1914 he was a lieutenant in Cairo. Experts on Arab affairs—especially those who had travelled in the Turkish-held Arab lands—were rare, and he was assigned to intelligence, where he spent more than a year, mostly interviewing prisoners, drawing maps, receiving and processing data from agents behind enemy lines, and producing a handbook on the Turkish Army. When, in mid-1915, his brothers Will and Frank were killed in action in France, T.E. was reminded cruelly of the more active front in the West. Egypt at the time was the staging area for Middle Eastern military operations of prodigious inefficiency; a trip to Arabia convinced Lawrence of an alternative method of undermining Germany’s Turkish ally. In October 1916 he had accompanied the diplomat Ronald Storrs on a mission to Arabia, where Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, amīr of Mecca, had the previous June proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Storrs and Lawrence consulted with Ḥusayn’s son Abdullah, and Lawrence received permission to go on to consult further with another son, Fayṣal, then commanding an Arab force southwest of Medina. Back in Cairo in November, Lawrence urged his superiors to abet the efforts at rebellion with arms and gold and to make use of the dissident shaykhs by meshing their aspirations for independence with general military strategy. He rejoined Fayṣal’s army as political and liaison officer.

Lawrence was not the only officer to become involved in the incipient Arab rising, but from his own small corner of the Arabian Peninsula he quickly became—especially from his own accounts—its brains, its organizing force, its liaison with Cairo, and its military technician. His small but irritating second front behind the Turkish lines was a hit-and-run guerrilla operation, focusing upon the mining of bridges and supply trains and the appearance of Arab units first in one place and then another, tying down enemy forces that otherwise would have been deployed elsewhere, and keeping the Damascus-to-Medina railway largely inoperable, with potential Turkish reinforcements thus helpless to crush the uprising. In such fashion Lawrence—“Amīr Dynamite” to the admiring Bedouins—committed the cynical, self-serving shaykhs for the moment to his king-maker’s vision of an Arab nation, goaded them with examples of his own self-punishing personal valor when their spirits flagged, bribed them with promises of enemy booty and English gold sovereigns.

Aqaba—at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea—was the first major victory for the Arab guerrilla forces. They seized it after a two-month march on July 6, 1917. Thenceforth, Lawrence attempted to coordinate Arab movements with the campaign of General Sir Edmund Allenby, who was advancing toward Jerusalem, a tactic only partly successful. In November, Lawrence was captured at Darʿā by the Turks while reconnoitering the area in Arab dress and was apparently recognized and homosexually brutalized before he was able to escape. The experience, variously reported or disguised by him afterward, left real scars as well as wounds upon his psyche from which he never recovered. The next month, nevertheless, he took part in the victory parade in Jerusalem and then returned to increasingly successful actions in which Fayṣal’s forces nibbled their way north, and Lawrence rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).

By the time the motley Arab army reached Damascus in October 1918, Lawrence was physically and emotionally exhausted, having forced body and spirit to the breaking point too often. He had been wounded numerous times, captured, and tortured; had endured extremities of hunger, weather, and disease; had been driven by military necessity to commit atrocities upon the enemy; and had witnessed in the chaos of Damascus the defeat of his aspirations for the Arabs in the very moment of their triumph, their seemingly incurable factionalism rendering them incapable of becoming a nation. (Anglo-French duplicity, made official in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence knew, had already betrayed them in a cynical wartime division of expected spoils.) Distinguished and disillusioned, Lawrence left for home just before the Armistice and politely refused, at a royal audience on October 30, 1918, the Order of the Bath and the DSO, leaving the shocked king George V (in his words) “holding the box in my hand.” He was demobilized as a lieutenant colonel on July 31, 1919.

A colonel at 30, Lawrence was a private at 34. In between he lobbied vainly for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (even appearing in Arab robes) and lobbied vainly against the detachment of Syria and Lebanon from the rest of the Arab countries as a French mandate. Meanwhile he worked on his war memoir, acquiring for the purpose a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, effective (for a seven-year term) in November 1919. By that time his exploits were becoming belatedly known to a wide public, for in London in August 1919 an American war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, had begun an immensely popular series of illustrated lectures, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” The latter segment soon dominated the program, and Lawrence, curious about it, went to see it himself.

Lawrence was already on a third draft of his narrative when, in March 1921, he was wooed back to the Middle East as adviser on Arab affairs to the colonial minister, then Winston Churchill. After the Cairo political settlements, which redeemed a few of the idealistic wartime promises Lawrence had made, he rejected all offers of further positions in government; and, with the covert help of his wartime colleague, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, enlisted under an assumed name (John Hume Ross) in the Royal Air Force on Aug. 28, 1922. He had just finished arranging to have eight copies of the revised and rhetorically inflated 330,000-word text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the press of the Oxford Times and was emotionally drained by the drafting of his memoir. Now he was willing to give up his £1,200 Colonial Office salary for the daily two shillings ninepence of an aircraftman, not only to lose himself in the ranks but to acquire material for another book. He was successful only in the latter. The London press found him at the Farnborough base, the Daily Express breaking the story on December 27. Embarrassed, the RAF released him early the next month.

Finding reinstatement impossible, Lawrence looked around for another service and through the intervention of a War Office friend, Sir Philip Chetwode, was able to enlist on March 12, 1923, as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, this time as T.E. Shaw, a name he claimed to have chosen at random, although one of the crucial events of his postwar life was his meeting in 1922, and later friendship with, George Bernard Shaw. (In 1927 he assumed the new name legally.) Posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset, he acquired a cottage nearby, Clouds Hill, which remained his home thereafter. From Dorset he set about arranging for publication of yet another version of Seven Pillars; on the editorial advice of his friends, notably George Bernard Shaw, a sizable portion of the Oxford text was pruned for the famous 128-copy subscription edition of 1926, sumptuously printed and bound and illustrated by notable British artists commissioned by the author.

Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains one of the few 20th-century works in English to make epical figures out of contemporaries. Though overpopulated with adjectives and often straining for effects and “art,” it is, nevertheless, an action-packed narrative of Lawrence’s campaigns in the desert with the Arabs. The book is replete with incident and spectacle, filled with rich character portrayals and a tense introspection that bares the author’s own complex mental and spiritual transformation. Though admittedly inexact and subjective, it combines the scope of heroic epic with the closeness of autobiography.

To recover the costs of printing Seven Pillars, Lawrence agreed to a trade edition of a 130,000-word abridgment, Revolt in the Desert. By the time it was released in March 1927, he was at a base in India, remote from the publicity both editions generated; yet the limelight sought him out. Unfounded rumors of his involvement as a spy in Central Asia and in a plot against the Soviet Union caused the RAF (to which he had been transferred in 1925 on the intervention of George Bernard Shaw and John Buchan with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) to return him to England in 1929. In the meantime, he had completed a draft of a semi-fictionalized memoir of Royal Air Force recruit training, The Mint (published 1955), which in its explicitness horrified Whitehall officialdom and which in his lifetime never went beyond circulation in typescript to his friends. In it he balanced scenes of contentment with air force life with scenes of splenetic rage at the desecration of the recruit’s essential inviolate humanity. He had also begun, on commission from the book designer Bruce Rogers, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose, a task he continued at various RAF bases from Karāchi in 1928 through Plymouth in 1931. It was published in 1932 as the work of T.E. Shaw, but posthumous printings have used both his former and adopted names.

Little else by Lawrence was published in his lifetime. His first postwar writings, including a famous essay on guerrilla war and a magazine serial version of an early draft of Seven Pillars, have been published as Evolution of a Revolt (edited by S. and R. Weintraub, 1968). Minorities (1971) reproduced an anthology of more than 100 poems Lawrence had collected in a notebook over many years, each possessing a crucial and revealing association with something in his life.

Lawrence’s last years were spent among RAF seaplanes and seagoing tenders, although officialdom refused him permission to fly. In the process, moving from bases on the English Channel to those on the North Sea and leading charismatically from the lowest ranks as Aircraftman Shaw, he worked on improved designs for high-speed seaplane-tender watercraft, testing them in rigorous trials and developing a technical manual for their use.

Discharged from the Royal Air Force on February 26, 1935, Lawrence returned to Clouds Hill to face a retirement, at 46, filled alternately with optimism about future publishing projects and a sense of emptiness. To Lady Astor, an old friend, he described himself as puttering about as if “there is something broken in the works . . . my will, I think.” A motorcycling accident on May 13 solved the problem of his future. He died six days later without regaining consciousness.

Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.

Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.

Thomas Edward Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence of Arabia see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Shaw see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Shaw, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward


Laye, Camara
Laye, Camara (Camara Laye) (b. January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea] - d. February 4, 1980, Senegal).  Guinean novelist.  Laye comes from a Malinke family from Kouroussa, Upper Guinea.  His father was a jeweller and goldsmith, his mother a smith’s daughter.  A Muslim by faith, Laye attended a Qur’anic school, then the French primary school at Kouroussa.  At Conakry technical college, he received a first class proficiency certificate in mechanical engineering.  He was sent to France to the Central School of Automobile Engineering at Argenteuil.  On his own initiative, he entered the Ecole Ampere in Paris, working for the diploma in industrial instruction.  To earn a living, Laye had to work for eight months as a mechanic at the Simca works, while following evening courses at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts.  He finally studied for a specialized diploma in engineering at the Technical College for Aeronautics and Automobile Construction.

Laye’s literary career began in his Paris student days.  Unlike most other African writers -- some of whom have adversely criticized Laye -- Laye is politically non-partisan, and remarkable rather for his psychological insight.  His first book, L’enfant noir (The Dark Child) (1953) is an autobiographical novel for which Laye, still a student in Paris, was awarded the Charles Veillon prize.  It is remarkable for its picture of the traditions of Malinke civilization.  Laye’s second novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) (1954) is an allegory about man’s search for God, written in a colloquial griot style, in which the adventures of the hero are developed in a narrative sometimes comic, sometimes touching, and always with immense verve. 

Camara Laye (born January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea]; d. February 4, 1980, Senegal) was an African writer from Guinea. During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.

Camara Laye was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name -- Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fourteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.

In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.

In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.

In 1975 Laye became acutely ill with a kidney condition that had first troubled him back in 1965, but he could not afford the treatment in Europe that he needed. Reine Carducci, wife of the Italian UNESCO ambassador to Senegal and an admirer of Laye's work, became conscious of Laye's plight and championed an appeal for financial support. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, made the largest contribution; Laye later wrote his biography and expressed his admiration for the leader. Laye received the necessary medical care in Paris and returned periodically for further treatment.

In 1971, Laye began writing Le Maître de la parole (1978). Though eschewing collaboration with the many exiled enemies of Touré, Laye in an interview did not hide his debt to Kafka and the surrealists and his intention to mingle fiction and reality into a new and greater truth in the effort to express his own outrage at what had happened to his homeland. An honest artist and a sensitive participant in the pains of a post-colonial world, Laye produced works that speak about the clamor and that are more poignant because of their intense dream-like style. Eventually, Laye's ill health caught up with him and he died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, where he is buried.


Layth ibn Sa‘d, al-
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al- (713-791).  Transmitter of hadith and a jurisconsult of Persian origin in Egypt.  He is ranked among the leading authorities on questions of religious knowledge in the early years of the Islamic Empire.


Laz
Laz (Lazi) (Lazepe) (Lazlar) (C'ani).  People of South Caucasian stock, now dwelling in the southeastern corner of the shores of the Black Sea, in the region called in Ottoman times Lazistan.

The Laz (Lazi are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Black Sea coastal regions of Turkey and Georgia. One of the chief tribes of ancient kingdom of Colchis, the Laz were initially early adopters of Christianity, and most of them subsequently converted to Sunni Islam during Ottoman rule of Caucasus in the 16th century.

The Laz of Turkey form two principal groups. One of these are indigenous to the eastern Black Sea province formerly known as Lazistan (modern Rize and Artvin provinces). The other group fled the Russian expansion later in the 19th century and settled in Adapazarı, Sapanca, Yalova and Bursa, in western and eastern parts of the Black Sea and Marmara regions, respectively. The Laz speak the Laz language, related to Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan (South Caucasian languages). Laz identity in Georgia has largely merged with a Georgian identity and the meaning of "Laz" is seen as merely a regional category, and are mainly concentrated in Ajaria.

The Laz were converted to Christianity while living under the Byzantine Empire and kingdom of Colchis. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of Laz became Sunni Muslims of Hanafi madh'hab, and were ruled as part of the Lazistan sanjak. There is also a very limited number of Christian Laz in Georgia. The Laz are primarily designated as fisherfolk by the Turkish public (in fact, they are mostly farmers of tea and maize) because anchovies constitute an important part of their diet.


Lazi see Laz
Lazepe see Laz
Lazlar see Laz
C'ani see Laz


Lazar
Lazar (Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović) (Tsar Lazar) (1329 - June 28 [O. S. June 15], 1389).  King of Serbia who was defeated by Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389.  Lazar died in 1389.

Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović, also known as Tsar Lazar, was a medieval Serbian knez (Knyaz), ruler of Moravian Serbia, a part of the once powerful Serbian Empire under Dušan the Mighty. Lazar fought at the Battle of Kosovo with an army half the size of the Ottoman Empire and perished, together with most of the Serbian nobility and Murad I, which eventually led to the fall of Serbia as a sovereign state. The Battle of Kosovo is regarded as highly important for Serb national consciousness and the knez is venerated as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a hero in Serbian epic poetry.



Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović see Lazar
Hrebelianovic, Stefan Lazar  see Lazar
Tsar Lazar see Lazar


Lemano
Lemano (Liamano).  In Brazil, the spiritual and temporal head of Muslim slaves brought over during the colonial period.  He was the supreme chief and master of worship among the Hausa and Fulani blacks.  In religious ceremonies, the lemano directed the prayers and the reading of the Qur’an, while a chorus of women chanted in Arabic.
Liamano see Lemano


Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus (Joannes Leo Africanus) (Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi) (1488/1494-1552/1554). Name by which the author of the Descrittione dell’ Africa (The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained) is generally known.  His original name is al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati (or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wizaz al-Fasi). He was born in (Granada) Spain to a wealthy family which moved to Fez after the Christian conquest of Spain in 1492.  Leo Africanus was educated in Fez.  He attended the University of al-Karaouine.  He left there to travel in North Africa, working as a clerk and a notary. 

As a young man, Leo Africanus accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions throughout the Maghreb, reaching as far south as Timbuktu.  Between 1510 and 1513, he travelled into the Sudanic region of West and Central Africa, crossing the desert via Sijilmasa, Taghaza and Timbuktu.  He visited the Songhay empire at its zenith, as well as, Mali, the Hausa states, and the Bulala state which occupied the former Kanem empire.    Returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was captured by Sicilian corsairs (Christian pirates) near Tunis and taken to Rome.  There he was presented to Pope Leo X.  Leo Africanus had carried with him an Arabic draft of his Descrittione.  Pope Leo recognizing this achievement, freed Leo Africanus and baptized him in 1520.  He was given the name Giovanni Leoni, but became known as Leo Africanus. 

He completed his book in 1526; it was published in Italian in 1550 and in English in 1660.  The work was of seminal value, although Leo perpetuated the error of al-Idrisi in asserting that the Niger River flowed from east to west.  The error was not corrected until Mungo Park saw the Niger in 1796.  A misreading of Leo Africanus is also largely responsible for the vaunted reputation which Timbuktu had among Europeans in later years. 

Before 1550, Leo Africanus returned to Tunis, and probably spent the last years of his life practicing his ancestral faith, Islam.  The Descrittione remained for centuries a major source of the Islamic world, and is still cited by historians and geographers of Africa.  As an explorer of Western and Central Sudanic regions, Leo Africanus was the most important chronicler of that part of Africa between Ibn Battuta (c.1350) and the nineteenth century European explorers.




Africanus, Leo see Leo Africanus
Africanus, Joannes Leo see Leo Africanus
Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi see Leo Africanus
Fasi, Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Zayyati, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Leoni, Giovanni see Leo Africanus


Lewend
Lewend. Name given to two kinds of Ottoman daily-wage irregular militia, one sea-going, the other land-based.  The word may derive in its maritime sense from the Italian levantino.
Levantino see Lewend.


Liberation Movement of Iran
Liberation Movement of Iran (Freedom Movement of Iran) (Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran). Iranian political party whose program is based on a modernist interpretation of Islam. 

The Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) was founded in May 1961 by leaders of the former National Resistance Movement (NRM).  A few days after the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Muhammad Musaddiq) in August 1953, with his close collaborators either under arrest of surveillance, some of Mossadegh’s less politically prominent followers founded the NRM as a secret organization to uphold the nationalist cause under the repressive conditions of the new dictatorship.  Among its leaders were the cleric Sayyid Riza Zanjani, Mehdi Barargan, the lawyer Hasan Nazih, and Muhammd Rahim ‘Ata’i.  The NRM had two social bases: the bazaar and students.  Key NRM leaders came from a bazaar background, which facilitated contacts with Mossadeghist merchants who financed the movement; students, for their part, demonstrated.  Based in Tehran, the NRM was also present in a few provincial centers, most notably Mashhad, where ‘Ali Shari‘ati was active.

The NRM organized protest demonstrations against the regime on the occasions of Mossadegh’s trial (fall 1953), Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran (December 1953), sham parliamentary elections (winter 1954), and the new oil agreement that resolved Iran’s dispute with Great Britain (spring 1954).  Internal disagreements -- between secular and Islamist activists, between opponents and proponents of collaboration with the communists -- weakened the movement, and after 1954 the increasing efficiency of the shah’s security apparatus caused NRM activity to decline, until the organization was crushed in 1957 when all top activists were arrested and held prisoner for eight months.

When in 1960, Mossadeghists became active again in the course of the shah’s liberalization policies, carried out in response to President John F. Kennedy’s election, conflict arose between erstwhile NRM leaders and the National Front’s old guard of former cabinet members.  Two issues were at stake.  First, NRM veterans and their young sympathizers in the National Front wanted to target the shah personally, whereas the more moderate National Front leaders tried to spare him, hoping that he would become a constitutional monarch.  Second, the core members of the former NRM, most whom were also active in Islamic circles, wanted to mobilize Iranians by appealing to their religious values, a policy the National Front’s secular leadership rejected.  The dispute came to a head in May 1961 when Mehdi Bazargan, Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, Hazan Nazih, Yad Allah Sahabi, and eight other men formed a separate party, the LMI.  The party was defined as Muslim, Iranian, constitutionalist, and Mossadeghist.

During the nineteen months of its activity, the LMI opposed the shah’s regime and its policies, calling on the ruler to respect the constitution.  When the shah named the independent politician ‘Ali Amini prime minister, the LMI tried to accommodate him so as to weaken the shah, unlike the National Front, which considered Amini too pro-American.  Amini’s resignation in July 1962, heralded the end of liberalization in Iran.  In January 1963, the shah had the entire leadership of the LMI and the National Front arrested, after both had sharply criticized his planned referendum on what would become the “White Revolution.”  Although the secular politicians were soon released, the LMI leaders were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.

After the violent repression of the June 1963 riots, which propelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into the political limelight and in which certain lower level LMI activists participated, the shah’s rule became increasingly autocratic.  This made any oppositional party activity in Iran impossible.  Several young LMI militants concluded that the legal constitutional methods of their elders having failed, armed struggle was now called for: they formed the Mujahidin-i Khalq.  Others decided to continue the struggle against the shah abroad and formed an LMI-in-exile.  The chief initiators of this move were ‘Ali Shari‘ati, Ibrahim Yazdi, and Mustafa Chamran.  The first was active in Paris until his return to Iran in 1964.  Yazdi’s base was Houston, Texas, but he was also in close contact with Khomeini in Iraq.  Chamran first worked in the United States but then moved to Lebanon, where he had a leading role in the formation of the Amal movement.

The LMI reconstituted itself in 1977 with Bazargan as chairman.  In 1978, the party would have preferred to accept the shah’s offer of free elections, but recognizing Khomeini’s hold on Iranian public opinion, it went along with Bazargan’s rejection of elections.  In the last weeks of the shah’s regime, LMI figures played a leading role in negotiating with striking oil workers, military leaders, and United States diplomats to smooth the transfer of power to the revolutionaries.  In 1979, most LMI leaders held key positions in the provisional government.  After its ouster in the wake of the seizure of the United States hostages in November, the LMI gradually became an oppositional force.  It was represented in the first parliament of the Islamic Republic but barred from presenting candidates in subsequent elections.  After 1982, it sharply criticized Khomeini’s unwillingness to end the Iran-Iraq War.  After that its activities were sharply restricted, and many of its leaders were in and out of prison.

Remarkable continuity characterizes the LMI in its two periods of activity.  The party’s program derives from a liberal interpretation of Shi‘a Islam that rejects both royal and clerical dictatorship in favor of political and economic liberalism, which are both considered more conducive to the flowering of Islamic values than coercion.  Based on a relatively narrow constituency of religiously inclined professionals, the party’s major weakness has been its inability to engender mass support.


Freedom Movement of Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran
FMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
LMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran


Limba
Limba.  The oldest but third largest ethnic group in the Republic of Sierra Leone (after the Temne and Mende) are the Limba.  Perhaps seventy percent (70%) of the Limba are Muslims.  Except for a handful in Guinea, all live within Sierra Leone’s borders.

Limba traditions connect them with archaeological discoveries dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries.  Limba claim they originated from roughly what is Limba country today.  But the original Limba clan, which appears to have been the Kamara, gradually expanded with infusion from Manding-speaking peoples coming from the north, from the direction of the Mali Empire in about the eighteenth century.  This gave rise to new ruling families among the various Limba subgroups, who now hold the positions of paramount chiefs, as the traditional rulers, usually descended from pre-colonial kings and rulers, are now called.  Among the Wara Wara, the Mansaray clan holds this position.  Among the Biriwa, it is the Conteh (or Konde, as it is called in Francophone areas).  The Safroko have the Bangura as the ruling clan, while the Kargbo clan dominates the Tonko Limba.

These Mandinka related clans were bearers of at least rudimentary elements of Islam as they migrated southward.  Some, like the Conteh of Biriwa, were said to be Muslims when they reached Limba country, though they quickly abandoned Islam.  Some Islamic words and elements like baraka (blessing) and almamy (chief) were thus initially brought into Limba culture.  Traders, clerics and karamokos (Islamic teachers and sometimes charm makers) visiting these areas also contributed to the Islamization process.

Large scale conversion to Islam, however, occurred in the late nineteenth century with the wars of expansion of the Mandinka conqueror, Samory Toure of Konyan country, presently in the Republic of Guinea.  Samory’s empire, in 1886, embraced the entire Limba country, and one element of his control was conversion to Islam.  Today, although Christianity has taken some root, especially among the Tonko and Sela Limba, the majority of Limba are Muslims.  Among the more prominent Limba is Siaka Stevens, the first president of Sierra  Leone, and Joseph Momoh, the second president of Sierra Leone.


Lipqa
Lipqa (Lipka) (Lubqa) (Lipkowie) (Lipcani) (Muslimi).  Name given to the Tatars who since the fourteenth century inhabited Lithuania, and later the eastern and southeastern lands of old Poland up to Podolia, and after 1672 also partly Moldavia and Dobruja.

The Lipka Tatars are a group of Tatars who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of 14th century. The first settlers tried to preserve their shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars - this time, Muslims, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great. These Tatars first settled around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas and later spread to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. From the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars. While maintaining their religion, they united their fate with that of the mainly Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the Battle of Grunwald onwards the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland.

The Lipka Tatar origins can be traced back to the descendant states of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan - the White Horde, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate and Kazan Khanate. They initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses and gardening skills. Throughout centuries they resisted assimilation and kept their traditional lifestyle. Over time, they lost their original Tatar language and for the most part adopted Polish. There are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in today's Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, as well as their communities in the United States and Canada.


Lubqa see Lipqa
Lipka see Lipqa
Lipkowie see Lipqa
Lipcani see Lipqa
Muslimi see Lipqa


Liu Chih
Liu Chih (Liu Chiai-lien).  Eighteenth century Chinese Muslim scholar who was active as translator, theologian, philosopher and biographer of the Prophet.


Liu Chiai-lien see Liu Chih
Chih, Liu see Liu Chih
Chiai-lien, Liu see Liu Chih

Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan (Liaqat ‘Ali Khan) (Liaquat Ali Khan) (b. October 1, 1895, Karnal, India - d.

October 16, 1951, Rawalpindi, Pakistan).  Chief lieutenant in the All-India Muslim League and the first prime minister of Pakistan.  A member of a wealthy, landed family, he was educated at Aligarh and Oxford, and trained as a lawyer before entering politics.  He joined the Muslim League in 1923 and sided with Muhammad Ali Jinnah when the party temporarily split four years later.  As the general-secretary of the league from 1936 to independence, he played an influential role in shaping the party’s program.  Like Jinnah, his political views changed from seeking safeguards for Muslims within a united India to advocating partition and the creation of Pakistan.  Liaqat served in the legislature of the United Provinces from 1926 to 1940 and in the Indian Legislative Assembly from 1940 to 1947, where he was the deputy leader of the league’s parliamentary party.  In 1946, he was appointed the finance minister in the interim government of India created under the Cabinet Mission Plan.  With independence, he became the prime minister of Pakistan and, following Jinnah’s death in 1948, the leader of the country.  In that capacity, he was instrumental in organizing Pakistan’s new government and defining its policies.  He continued to serve as prime minister until his assassination in 1951.

Liaquat Ali Khan (Liāqat Alī Khān) rose to political prominence as a member of the All India Muslim League. He played a vital role in the independence of India and Pakistan. In 1947, he became the prime minister of Pakistan. He was regarded as the right-hand man of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and first governor-general of Pakistan. Liaquat was given the titles of Quaid-e-Millat (Leader of the Nation), and posthumously Shaheed-e-Millat (Martyr of the Nation).

Liaquat was a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, Oxford University and Middle Temple, London. He rose into prominence within the Muslim League during the 1930s. Significantly, he is credited with persuading Jinnah to return to India, an event which marked the beginning of the Muslim League's ascendancy and paved the way for the Pakistan movement. Following the passage of the Pakistan Resolution in 1940, Liaquat assisted Jinnah in campaigning for the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims. In 1947, the British Raj was divided into the modern-day states of India and Pakistan.

Following independence, India and Pakistan came into conflict over the fate of Kashmir. Khan negotiated extensively with India's then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and pushed for the referral of the problem to the United Nations. During his tenure, Pakistan pursued close ties with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aftermath of Pakistan's independence also saw internal political unrest and even a foiled military coup against his government. After Jinnah's death, Khan assumed a more influential role in the government and passed the Objectives Resolution, a precursor to the Constitution of Pakistan. He was assassinated in 1951.


Liaqat 'Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liaquat Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan



Lodis
Lodis (Lodhis). Afghan tribe and dynasty which ruled over parts of north India (r.1451-1526).  The first ruler Bahlul (r. 1451-1489) captured Delhi in 1451.  He saw himself as a chief of chiefs rather than an absolute autocrat, but his son Sikandar II (r. 1489-1517) considered himself a fully-fledged Sultan.  Sultan Ibrahim II (r. 1517-1526) fell in battle, and the sultanate passed into the hands of the Mughals.

Afghan migrations to India began during the early Turkish period.  By the time of Muhammad ibn Tughluq the Afghans constituted an important segment of the nobility.  An Afghan merchant, Malik Bahram, joined the service of a governor of Multan and served him so devotedly that he entrusted his son Malik Kala with the administration of Daurala.  Malik Kala’s son Bahlul founded the Lodi dynasty in 1451 and ruled until 1489.  He was followed by Sikandar (1489-1519) and Ibrahim (1517-1526).  Ibrahim met his end at the hands of Babur at the Battle of Panipat (1526), following which the Lodi dynasty yielded its place in India to the Mughal empire.

The Lodis had come to power at a time when the Delhi sultanate had shrunk in dimensions and the contumacious activities of chieftains in the Punjab and the growing ambitions of the Sharqis in the east had created formidable problems.  The Lodis sought to introduce principles characteristic of Afghan tribalism into Indian polity.  In matters of succession, suitability rather than the principle of heredity guided their action.  The army of the Delhi sultanate under them changed its character from “the king’s army” to “tribal militia.”  Some of the privileges and prerogatives of the sultan came to be commonly used by the nobles, and the king came to be looked upon as primus inter pares -- "first among equals".  The three Lodi rulers, however, demonstrated different attitudes in dealing with the nobility – Bahlul’s despotism was tempered by Afghan traditions of tribal equality; Sikandar made the nobles recognize the superior status of the monarch; and Ibrahim’s overbearing attitude alienated them.

Lodi is a common family name amongst Pashtuns, often linked with the title "Khan" to form the surname "Lodi Khan" or "Khan Lodi".
However, the surname "Khan" alone does not necessarily mean that the individual is Lodi.

Today, the Lodi are found primarily in Afghanistan, the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and the Punjab region. They usually practice Islam, the majority being Sunni.


Lodhis see Lodis


Loya Jirga
Loya Jirga. Councils summoned by Afghan rulers over the past century to consolidate their authority and nationalist programs.  The term loya jirga means “grand assembly” in Pashtu.  Modernist Afghans and historians have attempted to trace loya jirga into the distant past and indigenous tribal custom, but loya jirga differ from tribal jirga in fundamental ways.  Tribal jirga are a Pashtun custom of communal assembly for deciding on collective undertakings or settling internal conflicts.  Decisions are reached by a consensus ofr those attending.  Loya jirga are bodies of delegates summoned by the ruler and limited to his initiatives.  They include religious leaders, who have only ratifying roles in tribal jirga.  A more proximate model would be the majlis, for loya jirga belong to the history and centralization of government in modern Afghanistan.

The format was set by Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan (1880-1901), who initiated several consultative bodies to check the quasi-feudal jagir system of titleholders adopted by previous amirs and to assert power over officeholders and local leaders.  His arrangement of loya jirga as “national” assemblies alongside assemblies of titleholders (darbari shahi) and of local leaders (khawanin mulki) was formalized in the first constitution of Afghanistan proclaimed by Amir Amanullah (1919-1929) in 1923.

Boundaries of the nation and ther ruler’s authority have been the constants of loya jirga.  ‘Abd al-Rahman held three, according to Hasan Kakar, to affirm his negotiations of Afghanistan’s modern borders and his paramount authority within them.  Amanullah summoned a loya jirga in 1921 to ratify his treaty with Britain recognizing Afghanistan’s independence, again in 1924 after a rebellion against his efforts to modernize Afghanistan, and in 1928 to press reforms; the last provoked a civil war.  After its conclusion, Nadir Shah (1930-1933) called a loya jirga in 1930 to affirm his proclamation as ruler by a jirga of tribal militia.  Another was summoned in 1941 to accept British demands (to expel Axis nationals) that infringed Afghan sovereignty.  Loya jirga were convened again in 1949 and 1955 to press nationalist claims to tribal territories in Pakistan.  These were reaffirmed by a loya jirga summoned in 1964 to ratify a new constitution.

The last provides a picture of loya jirga at work.  Of more than 450 delegates, 176 were elected for the event, to offset 176 who were members of the National Assembly, with the balance drawn from appointed legislators, officials, and the committees that had drafted the constitution.  Although the delegates were not “king’s men,” it was the ruler’s assembly.  It was composed to check entrenched interests and to establish the authority of the center.

Whatever loya jirgas employ of regional traditions and techniques, their specific features belong to the history of modern Afghan government, not to tribal models.  Loya jirga have never assembled to settle conflicts or to decide a course of collective action, but only on a ruler’s intiative, and then more for communication than for consultation between the ruler and constituent communities.  Apparently formulated by Amir Abd al-Rahman as a check on title holders and local leaders, the loya jirga has been a device for nationalizing the boundaries of the country and authority within it.

Loya jirgas in the history of Afghanistan include:

    * 1707-1709 — Loya jirga was gathered in Shahri Safa, according to Said Kasim, Rishtia in 1707, but according to Mir Ghulam M. Ghobar, this loya jirga was gathered in Manja in 1709.
    * October 1747 — A jirga at Kandahar was attended by Pashtun representatives who appointed Ahmad Shah Durrani as their new leader.
    * 1793 — A jirga called by Timur Shah Durrani, the son of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who wanted to transfer the capital of the Durrani Empire from Kandahar to Kabul.
    * 1880 — A jirga called by Abdur Rahman Khan.
    * September 1928 — A jirga at Paghman, called by King Amanullah, the third loya jirga of his reign (1919-1929) to discuss reforms.
    * September 1930 — A jirga a meeting of 286 called by Mohammed Nadir Shah to confirm his accession to the throne.
    * 1941 — Called by Mohammed Zahir Shah to approve neutrality in World War II.
    * 1947 — Held by Pashtuns in the Tribal Agencies to choose between joining India or Pakistan.
    * July 26, 1949 — Afghanistan-Pakistan relations rapidly deteriorated over a dispute, officially declared that it did not recognize the 1893 Durand Line border any longer between the two countries.
    * September 1964 — A meeting of 452 called by Mohammed Zahir Shah to approve a new constitution.
    * July 1974 — A meeting with Pakistan over the Duran Line.
    * January 1977 — Approved the new constitution of Mohammed Daoud Khan establishing one-party rule in the Republic of Afghanistan.
    * April 1985 — To ratify the new constitution of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
    * September 2001 — Four different loya jirga movements anticipating the end of Taliban rule. Little communication took place between each of them.
          o The first was based in Rome around Mohammed Zahir Shah, and it reflected the interests of moderate Pashtuns from Afghanistan. The Rome initiative called for fair elections, support for Islam as the foundation of the Afghan state, and respect for human rights.
          o The second was based in Cyprus and led by Homayoun Jarir, a member of the Islamic Party of his father-in-law, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Critics of the Cyprus initiative suspected that it served the interests of Iran. The members of the Cyprus initiative, however, considered themselves closer to the Afghan people and regard the Rome group as too close to the long-isolated nobility.
          o The most significant was based in Germany, which resulted in the Bonn Agreement (Afghanistan). This agreement was made under United Nations auspices, established the Afghan Interim Authority and paved the way for the later jirgas that established the Constitution of Afghanistan.
          o A lesser initiative based in Pakistan.
    * June 13, 2002, The loya jirga of Afghanistan elected Hamid Karzai to oversee it. This was possible only because in the fall of 2001, Karzai was able to successfully lead one of the largest southern Afghanistan tribes against the draconian rule of the Taliban.
    * July 13, 2002 — Organized by the interim administration of Hamid Karzai, with about 2000 delegates, either selected through elections in various regions of the country or allocated to various political, cultural, and religious groups. It was held in a large tent in the grounds of Kabul Polytechnic from June 11 and was scheduled to last about a week. It formed a new Transitional Administration which took office shortly thereafter.
    * December 2003 — To consider the Proposed Afghan Constitution.
    * 2006 — Afghan president Hamid Karzai said that he and the Pakistani president will jointly lead a loya jirga to end a dispute over border attacks.
    * December 2009, after his disputed re-election, President Hamid Karzai announced to move ahead with a plan for a Loya Jirga to discuss the Taliban insurgency. The Taliban would be invited to take part in this Jirga.


Grand Assembly see Loya Jirga.


Lufti
Lufti (c.1367-1463).  Chaghatay Turkish poet of Herat in western Afghanistan.  He was a great master of the ghazal and a close friend of the Persian poet and mystic Jami.


Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad (Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid) (Ahmed Lufti al-Sayed) (Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed Pasha) (January 15, 1872 - 1963).  Egyptian intellectual and anti-colonial activist.

Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed Pasha was an Egyptian intellectual, anti-colonial activist, and the first director of Cairo University. He was also one of the architects of modern Egyptian nationalism as well as the architect of Egyptian secularism and liberalism. He was fondly known as the Professor of the Generation. He was one of the fiercest opponents of pan-Arabism, insisting that Egyptians are Egyptians and not Arabs.

Lutfi was born to a family of land owners in the village of Berqin, near Al Senbellawein in the Dakahlia Governorate on January 15, 1872. He was educated at Al-Azhar University where he attended lectures by Muhammad Abduh. Abduh came to have a profound influence on Lutfi's reformist thinking in later years. Ahmed Lufti el-Sayed subsequently attended the School of Law from which he graduated in 1894.

In 1907, Ahmed Lufti el-Sayed founded Egypt's first political party, el-Umma (the Nation), which came as a reaction to the 1906 Dinshaway Incident and the rise of Egyptian nationalist sentiment. He also founded the Umma Party newspaper, el-Garida, whose statement of purpose read: "El-Garida is a purely Egyptian party which aims to defend Egyptian interests of all kinds."

He was a member of the Egyptian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference held in Versailles in 1919, where he pleaded for the independence of Egypt from Britain.

Ahmed Lufti el-Sayed was also the first director of the Egyptian University, inaugurated on Monday May 11, 1925. He was a close friend of Taha Hussein, and resigned his post as university director as a protest against the Egyptian government's decision to transfer Hussein from his university position in 1932. He resigned again in 1937 when the Egyptian police broke into the court of the Egyptian University. During his presidency of the Egyptian University, the first class of females graduated with a university degree.

In addition, Ahmed Lufti el-Sayed held various positions such as the minister of education, the minister of interior, the director of the Arabic language assembly, and the director of House of Books. He died in 1963.

Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Ahmed Lufti al-Sayed see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Sayyid, Ahmad Lufti al- see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Sayed, Ahmed Lufti al- see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed Pasha see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad
Professor of the Generation see Lufti al-Sayyid, Ahmad


Lufti Efendi, Ahmed
Lufti Efendi, Ahmed (Ahmed Lufti Efendi) (1816-1907).  Ottoman court historiographer and poet.  His most famous work is the continuation of the history of Ahmed Jewdet Pasha.  The work, in 15 volumes, covers the events between 1825 and 1876.
Ahmed Lufti Efendi see Lufti Efendi, Ahmed


Lufti Pasha
Lufti Pasha (c. 1488-1562).  Ottoman statesman and Grand Vizier.  In 1539, he led the negotiations which ended the war with Venice and headed negotiations with the Habsburgs over Ferdinand’s claims to territory in Hungary whose issue eventually led to war in 1541.


Luqman
Luqman (Luqman The Wise) (Luqmaan) (Lukman) (Luqman al-Hakeem) (c.1100 B.C.T.).  Legendary hero and sage of pre-Islamic Arabia.  He appears in the Qur’an as a monotheist and a wise father giving pious admonitions to his son.  In later Islamic lore, he became the creator of fables par excellence and a striking parallel of Aesop.

Luqman is believed to have come from Nubia (present day Ethiopia).  He was a perceptive man, always watching the animals and plants of his surroundings, and he tried to understand the world based on what he saw.  One day, whilst sleeping under a tree, an angel came to him and said God wanted to bestow a gift upon Luqman: either to be a prophet or a wise man.  Luqman chose to be a wise man, and when he awoke from his slumber, he was aware of his senses and his understanding had sharpened. He felt in complete harmony with nature and could understand the inner meaning of things, beyond their physical reality.  Immediately he bowed down, and thanked and praised God for this wonderful gift. Unfortunately, Luqman was captured by slavers and sold as a slave. However, his master was a kind man and ordered that immediately after his death, Luqman should be freed.

Once Luqman became a freed man, he travelled and settled in the district of the Elah and Midian. He was appointed as a judge during King David's time.  According to Sunni belief, Luqman was once asked "What has brought you what we see?" meaning his high rank. Luqman said "Truthful speech, fulfilling the trust, and leaving what does not concern me."  Luqman had become what he set out to be -- a wise man, but not a prophet.

Luqman was a wise man for whom Surat Luqman, the thirty-first sura (chapter) of the Qur'an, was named. There are many stories about Luqman in Arabic and Turkish literature and the primary historical source is the Tafsir ibn Kathir. The Quran does not state whether or not Luqman was a prophet, but some people believe him to be a prophet and thus write Alayhis salaam (A.S.) with his name.

 


Luqman the Wise see Luqman
Luqmaan see Luqman
Lukman see Luqman
Luqman al-Hakeem see Luqman


Luqman ibn Sayyid Huseyin
Luqman ibn Sayyid Huseyin (d. 1601).  Ottoman poet and historian who wrote in Persian and Turkish.


Lur
Lur (Lor) (Luri). The Lur of Iran are concentrated in three major areas: Lurestan, Bakhtiari and Kuhgiluyeh, located along a northwest-southeast axis of the Zagros range and its southern foothills.  These mountains, from 100 to 200 miles wide, extend southeastward from Lake Van in Turkey to near Bandar Abbas in southern Iran, a distance of about 1,000 miles.  Throughout the system the intermontane valleys hold seasonally rich pastures, which have made possible the development of several nomadic pastoral societies such as the Kurds and Lur.

The Lur primarily inhabit the provinces of Luristan, Khuzestan, Hamadan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Isfahan and Ilam of Iran.

Like most Iranians, the Lur are a mixture of indigenous inhabitants of the Zagros Mountain and Iranian speaking tribes migrating from Central Asia.  Luri language, which is closely related to Persian, has two distinct dialects: (1) Lur-i-Buzurg (Greater Lur), which is spoken by the Bakhtiaris (mainly in Khuzestan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari), parts of Luristan, and parts of Isfahan and (2) Lur-i-Kuchik (Lesser Lur), spoken by the Lur themselves (mainly in Luristan). 

The overwhelming majority of Lurs are Shi'a Muslims.  In Khuzestan, Lur tribes are primarily concentrated in the northern part of the province, while in Ilam they are mainly in the southern region. Prior to the twentieth century of the Christian calendar, the majority of Lur were nomadic herders, with an urban minority residing in the city of Khorramabad. 

There is a plethora of historical speculation as to the origins of the Lur people.  One widely accepted theory is that they were Kurds similar to their present neighbors, who migrated from Syria into the western Zagros Mountains sometime after the Arab invasion of Iran in the seventh century of the Christian calendar.  Another somewhat indigenous people who were nomadic herders and spoke an Indo-Iranian language.  This territory served as no man’s land between the Medes, whose hegemony extended from Lake Urmia to the north of Kermanshah, and the area of the Persians, including present day Khuzistan, Kuhgiluyeh, and Fars Province.  The Achaemenians, the Sassanians and finally the Arabs held intermittent control over this rugged land and its warlike inhabitants. 

Around the tenth century, perhaps for administrative reasons, the whole region was broken into what became known as the Lurestan-e-Bozorg (“the large Lurestan”), the present Bakhtiari territory, and the Lurestan-e-Kuchak (“the small Lurestan”), the present province of Lurestan. Presumably, owing to internecine conflicts among the constituent tribes, each of the two Lurestans was subsequently further subdivided into smaller political units.  Today the Lurestan-e-Kuchak consists of two ecological and cultural zones.  Pusht Kuh (“behind the mountain”) and Peesh Kuh (“in front of the mountain”).

The recent history of relations between the central government and the tribal groups in this region has seen fundamental changes in many areas of tribal life.  During the early part of Reza Shah’s reign (1925-1942) pacification and elimination of tribes received priority.  The tribes, often mutually hostile and disunited, proved no match for the Shah’s relatively modernized army.  The oath of loyalty by the defeated chiefs was not sufficient to placate the Shah.  Nearly all central leaders net summary executions.  To force the transformation of the nomads into permanently settled farming peasants, annual migrations between the winter and summer pastures were banned. In little more than 12 years the nomads lost about ninety percent of their livestock with untold human suffering. 

The abdication of Reza Shah in 1942 and the ensuing political vacuum presented the long-awaited opportunity for the nomads to resume annual migrations and rebuild their vitiated pastoral economy.  With few exceptions, the new tribal leaders, perhaps naively, envisioned a smooth and constructive integration of the tribal societies into the national structure, with shared rights and responsibilities as full citizens.

The tribal policies of Mohammed Reza Shah (1942-1979) were scarcely less ruthless than those of his father.  The decade between 1953 and 1963 witnessed a renewed reign of terror for the tribes, as indeed for the entire country.  This is often attributed to (1) the Shah’s personal insecurity, which was heightened after the coup of 1953, which overthrew the nationalist government of Muhammad Mossadeq and reinstituted monarchic absolutism, and (2) his much revitalized army and his intelligence apparatus, the SAVAK.

From 1963 to 1978 the Pahlavi regime adopted a reformist strategy to deal with the tribes, introduced under the aegis of the Shah’s “White Revolution.”  Despite much publicity and fanfare, in reality the main objective of the planners was not so much modernization and development as the resurrection of the panacea of settling the tribes.

The much celebrated land reform, for example, created ecological disasters when impoverished nomads began a frantic conversion of steep mountain pastures into farmlands in order to qualify for individualized ownership of land.  Meanwhile, the introduction of the national system of education undermined the normative foundation of the traditional social and economic systems.  After 12 years of a primary and secondary education, the price of literacy was often alienation from the only available life-style.

The revolution of 1978-1979 ended the Pahlavi regime and brought a halt to at least some of the tragic waste of human and natural resources in the tribal enclaves.  Some progress was made in resuscitating the pastoral economy by eradicating the exploitive commercial practices of the town merchants while making interest free loans available to nomads.  Health clinics, electrification of villages and sanitization of drinking water received some attention from the authorities.  The educated tribesmen enjoyed a relatively more equal opportunity in finding employment in the local government agencies, although the higher-echelon positions were still the exclusive purview of the non-tribal Persian-speaking bureaucrats.  Tribal education still suffered from a heavy emphasis on indoctrination at the expense of a pragmatic approach which could in time ameliorate the material conditions of life.

Lor see Lur
Lors see Lur
Lurs see Lur
Luri see Lur


Lur-i Buzurg
Lur-i Buzurg (Lor-e-Bozorg) (Lur-e-Bozourg) ("Greater Lur").  Dynasty of atabegs which flourished in eastern and southern Luristan between 1155 and 1423.  The capital of the Lur-i Buzurg was Idhaj or Malamir.


Greater Lur see Lur-i Buzurg
Lor-e-Bozorg see Lur-i Buzurg
Lur-e-Bozourg see Lur-i Buzurg


Lurs
Lurs (in Persian, Lors).  See Lur.
Lors see Lurs
Lur see Lurs


Lutf ‘Ali Beg
Lutf ‘Ali Beg (Adhar) (1722-1781).  Persian anthologist and poet.  His fame rests primarily on an anthology of the poets of previous times and of the poets of Persia, Turan and Hindustan.
Adhar see Lutf ‘Ali Beg
Beg, Lutf 'Ali see Lutf ‘Ali Beg


Ma‘afiri, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-
Ma‘afiri, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al- (Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Ma‘afiri) (d. 1208).  Andalusian Maliki scholar.  He is the author of a work called Biographies of Famous Women which deals primarily with women from the Umayyad period.
Abu'l-Hasan 'Ali al-Ma'afiri see Ma‘afiri, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-


Ma’al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami
Ma’al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami (Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa ibn Muhammad Fadil al-Qalqami) (1831/1840-1910).  Scholar and religious and political leader of the Western Sahara.  He organized a desert community, combined the roles of doctor, teacher, arbitrator and avenger, and wrote some 300 books.  At least 30 of his major works are about Sufism.

Ma al-Aynayn was an important figure in the religio-political history of Mauritania and southern Morocco.

Ma al-Aynayn was the son of Muhammad Fadil, founder of the Fadiliyya Sufi brotherhood, a religious scholar and leader among the nomadic populations of northern Mauritania. Like his father, Ma al-Aynayn was head of the Fadiliyya, a noted scholar, and political leader. A prolific author, he is credited with over 140 books on a wide variety of topics.

A close ally and adviser of the sultans of Morocco from 1859, Ma al-Aynayn cooperated in the extension of Moroccan authority into the Western Sahara. Under Sultan Hassan I and his successor Abd al-Aziz, he organized resistance to imperialist incursions into the western Sahara by France and Spain.

At his death in 1910 he was succeeded by his son Ahmad Hibat Allah, known as "El Hiba."

Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa ibn Muhammad Fadil al-Qalqami see Ma’al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami
Qalqami, Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa ibn Muhammad Fadil al- see Ma’al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami
Qalqami, Ma' al-Aynayn al- see Ma’al-‘Aynayn al-Qalqami


Ma‘arri
Ma‘arri (Abu’l-‘Ala’ Ahmad al-Ma‘arri) (al-Ma'ari) (Al-Ma‘arri) (Abu al-'Alā Ahmad ibn 'Abd Allāh ibn Sulaimān al-Tanūkhī al-Ma'arri) (December 26, 973 – May 10 or May 21, 1057).  Arab poet and prose author from Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man.  Although he lost his eyesight at the age of four or five, the defect was more than compensated by his extraordinary retentive memory.  The poems of the first half of his life were collected in his The first spark of the tinder.  Other famous titles are The self-imposed compulsion, relating to a peculiarity of rhyme, Letter of a horse and a mule, and The letter of forgiveness.  A great deal of his work is supposed to have been lost during the Crusades.

Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-Tanukhi was born in Syria and lost his sight at the age of five due to smallpox.  He then went on to study in Aleppo, Antioch, and other Syrian towns pursuing a career as a freethinker, philosopher and poet before returning to his native town of Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, where he lived the rest of his life. 

Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-Tanukhi briefly travelled to the center of Baghdad where he drew a great following of disciples to listen to his lectures on poetry and grammar and rationalism.  One of the recurring themes of this philosophy was the rights of reason against the claims of custom, tradition and authority.

Al-Ma'arri taught that religion was a "fable invented by the ancients," worthless except for those who exploit the credulous masses.  He rejected all the claims of Islam as well as other religions stating: "Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications.  Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life.  The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce."

Al-Ma'arri criticized many of the dogmas of Islam, such as the Hajj, which he called, "a heathen's journey."  He viewed the ritualistic kissing of the black stone at Mecca as being the superstitious nonsense of religions that have only resulted in fanatical and sectarian bigotry and bloodshed to force their beliefs onto people at the point of a sword.

Al-Ma'arri's collections of poetry are titled The Tinder Spark (Saqt az-zand) and Unnecessary Necessity (Luzum ma la yalzam),   He is also well known for his famous book, The Epistle of Forgiveness (Resalat Al-Ghufran), which is one of the most influential books on the Arabic heritage and which left a notable imprint on the next generations of writers.   The Resalat Al-Ghufran is a book of divine comedy that concentrates on the Arabic poetical civilization but in a way that touches all aspects of life.  The most interesting characteristics of Resalat Al-Ghufran are its genius digression, deep philosophy, and brilliant language.  Some scholars believe that the Resalat Al-Ghufran clearly had an influence on Dante's Divine Comedy.


Ma'ari, al- see Ma‘arri
Abu’l-‘Ala’ Ahmad al-Ma‘arri see Ma‘arri
The Eastern Lucretius see Ma‘arri
Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al-Tanukhi see Ma‘arri
Tanukhi, Abu 'Ali al-Muhassin al- see Ma‘arri


Maassab, Hunein
Hunein Maassab (b.  June 11, 1926, Damascus,  - d.  February 1, 2014, North Carolina) was the developer of nasal spray flu vaccine.  He was born on June 11, 1926, in Damascus. His father was a jeweler. He enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he received a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1950 and a master’s in physiology and pharmacology in 1952. He then moved to Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in public health in 1954 and his doctorate in epidemiology in 1956.

"John" Hunein F. Maassab was a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan since 1960 and served as the chairman from 1991-1997. He founded and directed the Hospital and Molecular Epidemiology program in the Department of Epidemiology. Dr. Maassab was a member of several scientific organizations including the American Public Health Association and the American Society of Microbiology and was a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Dr. Maassab had over 170 publications that range from studies on the basic biology of viruses to research on the development of methods to control viral infections.

Dr. Maassab was awarded patents for the development of a cold-adapted influenza virus and for an attenuated respiratory syncytial virus. Dr. Maassab received the 1997 Award for Science and Technology from Popular Science for the development of the cold-adapted influenza virus. This discovery led him to develop a flu vaccine that can be administered by a nasal spray as an alternative to the "flu shot."

Influenza, commonly called "the flu," is an infection of the respiratory tract caused by the influenza virus. Compared with most other viral respiratory infections, such as the common cold, influenza infection often causes a more severe illness. Most people who get the flu recover completely in one to two weeks, but some people develop serious and potentially life-threatening medical complications, such as pneumonia. Between 25-50 million people in the United States are infected each year with the influenza virus. In an average year, infection with influenza virus is associated with 20,000 deaths nationwide and more than 100,000 hospitalizations. Approximately 90 million workdays are lost and 30 million school days are missed each year as a result of influenza.

Vaccination can prevent disease caused by influenza. Unlike vaccines used against other viruses such as measles, mumps, rubella and varicella, people need to be vaccinated annually against influenza. This is because the influenza virus often changes its genetic composition to evade the immune system of its host. Thus, people are susceptible to influenza virus infection throughout life. The current vaccine used for flu is a "killed" virus vaccine that is administered by injection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a flu shot for healthy adults over age 50 and high-risk children and adults. Unfortunately, less than one percent of healthy children and less than 30 percent of healthy adults, are routinely vaccinated. Achieving adequate flu protection is difficult because each year a new vaccine must be developed that is appropriate for the specific strainsof influenza likely to circulate. Currently, there is concern n the public health community regarding the timely supply of vaccine for the coming flu season.


In 1967, Dr. Maassab published a paper in the journal Nature describing the adaptation of an influenza virus for growth at a low temperature in culture. Importantly, this "cold-adapted" virus does not grow at higher temperatures such as those found in the lungs. However, the cold-adapted virus can replicate in the nasal passages where the temperature is lower. The cold-adapted virus cannot survive in the lungs where the body temperature is higher, and therefore cannot cause disease. The limited viral growth seen in the nasal passages may stimulate an immune response that may protect a person from infections from influenza viruses. This protection also prevents the spread of influenza to others.

Dr. Maassab developed an intranasal cold-adapted live virus vaccine that may provide promising alternative to the "flu shot." Using a nasal mist, an attenuated (weakened) live form of the influenza virus is sprayed into the nasal passages, where influenza viruses enter the body.

The public health significance of this finding for the development of an influenza vaccine was apparent. By using nasal mist technology to eliminate the fear of injections, this method may offer the first practical way to immunize children and adults on a large scale annually in the near future.


Maba
Maba.  The Maba of eastern Chad constitute that nation’s largest non-Arab Muslim group.  Like other Chadian Muslims, they are universally Sunni following the Maliki rite.  Primarily a farming population, they number some 200,000 people in Chad, with several thousands living as immigrants or refugees in neighboring Sudan.  Since their conversion to Islam in the seventeenth century, they have formed the nucleus of Wadai, today a province, but earlier a Muslim sultanate which came to dominate the eastern Chad Basin in the nineteenth century.  After years of resistance, the Maba of Wadai were conquered by the French in 1911.  A half-century of colonial rule did little to change their culture or to integrate them into the larger nation. 

The heritage of Arab immigration, political centralization and Islam are linked in the area.  Local traditions begin with a shadowy Daju dynasty replaced by the Tunjur Arabs at the end of the fifteenth century.  Both of these groups play a part in the political traditions of the Fur and hence, may indicate the appropriation of a neighboring dynastic history.  Clearly, small groups of Arab nomads had begun to move onto the Maba plateau in the fourteenth century.  An alternating pattern of conflict and cooperation between nomad and farmer began (and continues to the present).  Beyond dominating the Maba core area, the Tunjur apparently had little impact upon their subjects.

Liberation and conversion to Islam is said to have come at one stroke in the seventeenth century.  A small group of Arabs led by Abd al-Karim, reputedly an Abbasid prince, allied themselves with Maba chiefs and overthrew the Tunjur.  This victory and the foundation of Wadai represents an increase in Arab migration and Islamic influence in the region.  The resulting kingdom, however, was not exclusively Arab, the bulk of whom remained nomadic and somewhat marginal to political life.  From the capital of Wara and later Abeche, the rulers of Wadai and their Maba supporters enlarged their territory and hence their position as middlemen in the trans-Saharan and trans-continental trade.  Military campaigns, particularly in the south, provided ivory and the hundreds of slaves exported northward each year.  Pilgrims and merchants came from the west on their way to Red Sea ports.  By the mid-nineteenth century, Wadai was the strongest state in central Sudan, and Abeche was a cosmopolitan Muslim capital.  The presence there today of regional Sufi orders such as the Mirghaniyya (Sudan), Sanusiyya (Libya), Qadiriyya and the dominant Tijaniyya (West Africa) reflects Wadai’s central position. 

The colonial conquest was traumatic.  The French dismantled the traditional administrative system.  Drought, famine and epidemics reduced the population by an estimated fifty percent by 1918.  In the previous year, the French massacred about 100 Muslim scholars and their followers in Abeche.  Despite its former prominence, Wadai became a remote corner of French Equatorial Africa.  Its population remained largely semi-subsistence farmers and herdsmen.  Children were far more likely to attend Quranic classes than the handful of colonial schools serving 1,000 students in a population of 455,000.  Literacy (in French) was estimated at less than five percent.  Colonial neglect was not rectified in the early independence government, dominated as it was by Christian southerners.  The attitudes and policies of both groups have fueled a rebellion in the later part of the twentieth century.

Under French rule, Arab nomads were encouraged to settle and Maba began to accumulate herds, joining Arabs in seasonal migration.  Increased allegiance to Islam and the diffusion of the Arabic language became a form of cultural resistance.  The fuqura have been involved in both activities.  In Maba villages near Abeche, Arabic has become the sole language, and villagers have established an Arab identity complete with fictive genealogies.  In remoter areas, Arabic has become universally known.  Arabization has continued since independence.  The tradition of labor migrations to Sudan has reinforced ties with the larger Arab community, as has the revolt against the national government.

Armed opposition to the government of Francois Tombalaye began in central Chad in 1965, and then rapidly spread to the north and east including Wadai.  Motives were complex.  To the general resentment of northern Muslims towards a southern-dominated government was added opposition to the corruption of traditional chiefs and government bureaucrats, sectionalism and Islamic resurgence.  The conflict was obscured by political rivalry, banditry and the changing foreign patrons of various factions.  Maba participation was initially limited to émigrés in the Sudan who formed the Chadian Liberation Front (FLT), but the call for Muslim solidarity appealed to more and more Maba.  In the first months of 1982, Abeche became the center for Hissene Habre’s forces, who have subsequently established tenuous control over the northern two-thirds of the country.  Today, the Maba’s destiny in the war-torn country remained unclear.


Maba Diakhou Ba
Maba Diakhou Ba (Ma Ba Diakhu) (Prophet Maba) (1809 at Tavacaltou - July, 1867) was a religious and military leader who was responsible for the spread of Islam in much of the Senegambia.

The Prophet Maba was a Quranic scholar of the Tukolor clerical class.  He was raised in the Mandingo states of the Senegambia.  Maba’s family came from Futa Toro in present day Senegal, a center for the dispersion of Islam in West Africa.  A descendant of the Fulani dynasty of Denyankobe, from the branch of the Ba family in the region of Badibou, Maba Diakhou Ba combined political and religious goals in an attempt to reform or overthrow previous animist monarchies, and resist French encroachment.  He is in the tradition of Fulani jihad leaders who revolutionized the states of West Africa at the time of colonization. 

Around 1850, Maba met the famous Islamic revolutionary, al-Hajj Umar.  It is believed that al-Hajj Umar made Maba the representative of the rapidly developing Tijani Islamic brotherhood for the Senegambia.  Also around this time, the people of the Gambia states were divided into two factions -- the Soninke who were non-Muslims or apathetic Muslims and the Marabout who were orthodox Muslims.  The Prophet Maba was a member of the Marabout sect.

Maba soon founded his own town, Kirmaba, and began to gather his own followers.  In 1861, Maba was attacked by a Soninke group.  After he defeated the Soninke, other Muslim religious leaders and their followers joined him.  Thus, with one small victory a  great Muslim revolution began.

The Prophet Maba’s charisma and his belief in his divine mission appealed to Muslims in persecuted communities, whether they be Mandingo, Fula, or Wolof.  After conquering a number of smaller Mandingo and Wolof states, Maba turned on the larger Serer states, which had no Muslim minorities.

By 1865, Maba had extended his control to the important state of Saloum (Saloun).  During that time, Maba offered asylum to another famous military figure, Lat Dyor.  At the time, Lat Dyor was fighting the French.  Maba, too, would soon encounter the forces of imperialistic France. 

Maba converted Lat Dyor and his soldiers from the traditional Tieddo animism to Islam.  While Lat Dyor's conversion may have been for reasons more political than spiritual, he did become a powerful ally, even in exile, leading his forces alongside those of Sine.

On November 30, 1865, with the help of Lat Dyor and his Cayor forces, Maba Diakhou Ba began the conquest of the states of Sine, Baol and Djolof.  Later at Kaolack, Maba and Lat Dyor were checked by a combined force of French under Pinet-Laprade of 2000 cavalry and 4000 colonial infantry, allied with 1000 infantry and 500 cavalry from the states of Waalo, Ndiambour and Ndiander.  In 1866, Maba’s forces were forced to retreat to the south. 

Weakened by his losses to the French, Maba, nevertheless, resumed his attacks on the Serar state of Sine.  It was during the 1867 attack on Sine  that Maba was killed.  The victory for Sine was also a victory for the French.  With the demise of Maba, the French no longer had to deal with the threat of a unified Muslim force in the Senegambia.  However, even though Maba was unsuccessful in maintaining and expanding his Islamic empire, his influence was lasting.  His campaign permitted a new Muslim elite to seize power in their societies.  This Muslim elite was largely responsible for the conversion of the people of Senegambia to Islam.



Prophet Maba see Maba Diakhou Ba
Ma Ba Diakhu see Maba Diakhou Ba
Ba, Maba Diakhou see Maba Diakhou Ba


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