Mauritanian religious leader and founder of a school, was the grandson of his namesake known as “Sidiyya the Elder” (Sidiyya al-Kabir) and was raised by his uncles in the scholarly setting of his father and grandfather’s camps in southwestern Mauritania. His father, Sidi Muhammad, died in 1869 during a cholera outbreak when Baba was seven years old only one year after the death of Sidiyya al Kabir This was a moment when his lineage the Ntisha it was one of the dominant ones within the larger Awlad Abyiri a clerical lineage group that during his grandfather s time had risen to be among the most influential political forces in the region of Trarza southwestern Mauritania Sidiyya the Elder had spent a dozen years in the Kunta campus of the Azaouad adjacent to Timbuktu in the early nineteenth century and he brought back to the village that he founded at ...
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Baba, Sidiyya
Charles C. Stewart
Article
Ibn al-Abbar
Allen J. Fromherz
was born in Valencia, Spain in Rabi II 595 (according to the Islamic calendar), or January/February 1199, and is considered one of the greatest writers of the twelfth century. His full name, Abu ʿAbd Allah Ibn al-Abbar al QudaʿI, means “Son of the Seller of Sewing Needles,” indicating that his family was probably part of the small-scale merchant class in Muslim Spain.
As a young man Ibn al-Abbar witnessed the devastating battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 which turned the tide against the Almohads in Muslim Spain Divided and defeated the Muslim west began to fracture His early master Ibn Mardanish ruler in Murcia converted to Christianity possibly as a means of forming an alliance with other Christian rulers and averting the capture of his city Although Ibn al Abbar did not follow his master in converting he had no scruples about working for an ...
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Mahmud, Abd al-Halim
Robert D. Young
Egyptian religious authority, was born 12 May 1910 in Abu Hammad, Sharqiyya governate, Egypt. His father was an Azharite judge. Thus, Mahmud had the ancestral and familial support elements indicative of local elite status. However, it was Mahmud’s precociousness that may have led him to later become spiritual imam and religious leader for Islamic moderation in Egypt. Mahmud memorized the Qurʾan at such an early age that he was not yet eligible to attend religious school in the local village. By age 13, Mahmud moved with his father to Cairo to enroll in Azharite primary school. Egypt’s school system was organized primarily as religious schools of instruction; Azharite schools include primary, secondary, prep, and university levels, with the culmination being al-Azhar University in Cairo. Mahmud continued to advance quickly through the educational system, graduating from al-Azhar University in 1932.
After graduation Mahmud continued his advanced education moving to the ...
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Mazrui, Sheikh al-Amin
Yuusuf Caruso
Islamic reformer, scholar, teacher, and jurist, was born in the island town of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa, in what is now southeastern Kenya. Sheikh al-Amin’s family belonged to the Omani Arab clan that ruled Mombasa for almost two centuries. The Mazruʿi first emigrated from the Imamate of Oman in the Arabian peninsula to the east coast of Africa during the second half of the seventeenth century. Since the early 1500s, Portuguese soldiers and traders at Mombasa and Malindi had been engaged in an intermittent struggle against the indigenous Swahili merchant elite and the Omani Arabs. In the early eighteenth century, the Portuguese were finally driven out. In 1735 the Mazruʿi liwalis governors came to power in Mombasa and extended their rule over an area stretching from Ras Ngomeni north of Malindi to the Pangani River south of Tanga in what is now northeastern Tanzania ...
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Qutb, Sayyid
Ellis Goldberg
Egyptian author, literary critic, and activist who helped shape contemporary political Islam, was born in the Upper Egyptian village of Musha in Asyut province on 9 October 1906. His father, Qutb Ibrahim, was a farmer and member of the nationalist Watani party led by Mustafa Kamil. Qutb attended a state-run primary school, but had also memorized the Qurʾan in its entirety by 1916. Qutb experienced the massive 1919 revolt against British rule as a teenage activist. He left the village in 1921 and lived in the Cairo suburb of Zaytun with his mother’s brother for four years, while attending a high school associated with the modernist educational institution Dar al-ʿUlum (founded 1871). In 1929 he entered Dar al-ʿUlum itself and graduated in 1933.
After graduation Qutb first appeared on the Egyptian intellectual scene as a poet and literary critic He was then thought of as a ...
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Wansharisi, Ahmad al-
David S. Powers
Maliki scholar, jurist, and mufti, was born in Jabal Wansharis (Ouarsenis), a mountain massif in the Central Algerian Tell, 31 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Algiers. When Ahmad was five years old, his father moved the family to Tlemcen, where he studied the Qurʾan, Arabic language, and Maliki law and jurisprudence with distinguished scholars.
In 1469 at the age of forty al Wansharisi incurred the wrath of the Zayyanid sultan Muhammad IV who ordered that his house be ransacked and plundered Leaving everything behind al Wansharisi fled to Fez where he was welcomed by the scholarly community receiving food and shelter from the jurist Muhammad al Sughayyir He moved into a house near the Muʿallaq mosque in the Sharratin quarter of Fez al Qarawiyyin and was appointed professor of Maliki law at the Madrasa Misbahiyya His knowledge of the law was proverbial He who has not studied with al ...
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Zawahiri, Ayman al-
Efraim Barak
Muslim activist, terrorist, and leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command, and a qualified surgeon. Zawahiri was born on 19 June 1951, in Cairo’s Al-Maʿadi neighborhood, to a distinguished Egyptian family. Zawahiri is also known as Abu-Muhammad, Abu-Fatima, Muhammad Ibrahim, Abu-ʿAbdallah, Abu-al-Muʾis, The Doctor, The Teacher, al-Ustadh, Nur, and Nur al-Din. Zawahiri holds French and Swiss passports under the name of Amin Osman and a Dutch passport under the name of Sami Mahmud al-Hifnawi.
His father, Muhammad Rabi ʿAl-Zawahiri, who died in 1995, was a professor of Pharmacology at the University of ʿAin-Shams. His paternal grandfather, Shaikh al Ahmadi Al-Zawahiri, served as the ʾImam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. His maternal grandfather, Prof. ʿAbd Al-Wahab ʿAzzam (1894–1959 was a Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Cairo and served as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities Furthermore he was ...
