Thursday, May 18, 2023

2023: Elijah - El-Salahi

  Elijah

Elijah (in Arabic, Ilyas).  Biblical prophet mentioned in the Qur’an in connection with the worship of Baal.  In the Qur’an, at Sura 37:123-132, Elijah is remembered as a prophet sent to turn his people from Baal (idol) worship to monotheism.  In Muslim legend, there is confusion of Ilyas with al-Khadir (al-Khidr) and Idris.

Elijah (or Elias, whose name (El-i Jahu) means "My God is YHWH", "I, whose god is YHWH", was a prophet in Israel in the 9th century B.C.T. He appears in the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Mishnah, New Testament, and the Qur'an. According to the Books of Kings, Elijah raised the dead, brought fire down from the sky, and ascended into heaven in a chariot. In the Book of Malachi, Elijah's return is prophesied before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, making him a harbinger of the Messiah.

In Judaism, Elijah's name is invoked at the weekly Havdalah ritual that marks the end of Shabbat, and Elijah is invoked in other Jewish customs, among them the Passover seder and the Brit milah (ritual circumcision). He appears in numerous stories and references in the aggadah and rabbinic literature, including the Babylonian Talmud.

In Christianity, the New Testament describes how both Jesus and John the Baptist are compared with Elijah, and on some occasions, thought by some to be manifestations of Elijah, and Elijah appears with Moses during the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Hermon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believes Elijah returned in 1836 to visit Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, and the Bahá'í Faith believes Elijah returned in 1844 in Shiraz, Iran, as the Báb.

In Islam, in the Qur'an, Elijah is the prophet known as Ilyas. Similar to the story in the Hebrew Bible, Elijah preaches in opposition to Baal, pleading with the people not to forsake Allah.[Qur'an 6:85–89], [Qur'an 37:123–132] He also causes a famine and prophesies destruction on Ahab and Jezebel.

Ilyas see Elijah
Elias see Elijah
El-i Jahu see Elijah
My God is YHWH see Elijah
I whose god is YHWH see Elijah


Elisha
Elisha (in Arabic, Alisa’).  Biblical prophet mentioned in the Qur’an under the name Alisa’ or Alyasa’.


Alisa’ see Elisha
Alyasa’ see Elisha


El Moutawakel-Bennis
El Moutawakel-Bennis (Nawal El Moutawakel-Bennis) (b. April 15, 1962, Casablanca).  Moroccan runner who won the 400 meter hurdles gold medal, and set an Olympic record in doing so, at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California.  By winning the gold medal, El Moutawakel-Bennis became the first African woman, the first Arab woman and the first Moroccan to win an Olympic gold medal.  

Nawal El Moutawakel was a Moroccan hurdler, who won the inaugural women's 400 meter hurdles event at the 1984 Summer Olympics, thereby becoming the first female Muslim born on the continent of Africa to become an Olympic champion. In 2007, El Moutawakel was named the Minister of Sports in the upcoming cabinet of Morocco.

Although she had been a quite accomplished runner, the victory of El Moutawakel, who studied at Iowa State University at the time, was a surprise. The King of Morocco telephoned El Moutawakel to give his congratulations, and he declared that all girls born the day of her victory were to be named in her honor. Her medal also meant the breakthrough for sporting women in Morocco and other mostly Muslim countries.

In 1995, El Moutawakel became a council member of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), and in 1998 she became a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

El Moutawakel is a member of the International Olympic Committee, and she was the president of the evaluation commission for the selection of the host city for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. She was also tapped to lead the evaluation commission for the 2016 Summer Olympics as well.

In 2006, El Moutawakel was one of the eight bearers of the Olympic flag at the 2006 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Torino, Italy.

Nawal El Moutawakel-Bennis see El Moutawakel-Bennis
Moutawakel-Bennis, Nawal El see El Moutawakel-Bennis
Bennis, Nawal El Moutawakel see El Moutawakel-Bennis

2023: Emin - Evren




Emin Pasha
Emin Pasha (Mehmed Emin Pasha) (Mehmet Emin Pasha) (Eduard Schnitzer) (March 28, 1840, Oppelin, Silesia - October 23, 1892, Kanema, Congo Free State). German explorer and administrator in Africa.  Originally named Eduard Schnitzer, he was born in Oppelin, Silesia (now Opole, Poland).  He was an administrator in Sudan and made important contributions to the study of the geography, natural history, and ethnography of northeastern Africa.  He studied medicine at the University of Berlin.  From 1865 to 1875, he served the Turkish government as quarantine medical officer in Montenegro and Albania.  In the latter year, he journeyed to Cairo, where he was appointed medical officer in the Egyptian army under the British general Charles George Gordon and became known as Emin Effendi.  Gordon named him governor of the equatorial province of Sudan, with the title of bey in 1878 and, in that capacity, Emin Pasha conducted explorations of eastern Sudan and central Africa that contributed greatly to geographical and scientific knowledge.  In 1883, a revolt broke out in Sudan under the leadership of the Mahdi.  The Egyptian government abandoned the province in the following year and Emin Pasha eventually found himself isolated by rebel forces.  In April 1888, he was rescued at Wadelai by an expedition led by the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who tried in vain to persuade him to return to Egypt.  In a second Mahdist revolt later that year, Emin Pasha was deposed and imprisoned.  After his release, he returned to Egypt, where he resigned his office.  In 1890, he was commissioned by the German East Africa Company to lead an expedition into those regions of central Africa claimed by Germany.  He was killed by Arabs on October 23, 1892, at Kanema, in the Congo (now Zaire).  

Mehmet Emin Pasha was born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer but was baptized (c. 1847) Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer. He was a physician, naturalist and governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria on the upper Nile. ("Pasha" was a title conferred on him in 1886 and thereafter he was invariably referred to as "Emin Pasha".)  He contributed vastly to the knowledge of African geography, natural history, ethnology, and languages.

In 1865, Schnitzer became a medical officer in the Turkish army and used his leisure to begin learning the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian languages. While serving the Ottoman governor of northern Albania (1870–74), he adopted a Turkish mode of living and a Turkish name. In 1876, he joined the British governor-general of the Sudan, General Charles Gordon, as medical officer at Khartoum. In this post he was known as Emin Effendi and was called upon to tend to administrative duties and to carry out diplomatic missions to Uganda and elsewhere. In 1878, Gordon appointed him governor of Equatoria (in the southern Sudan), with the title of bey.

Conducting his excellent and enlightened administration from Lado, Emin traveled throughout the province, made extensive and valuable surveys, and also brought an end to slavery in the region. In the course of the Mahdist uprising, though the Egyptian government abandoned the Sudan (1884), the isolated Emin, now elevated to the rank of pasha, felt secure and was initially reluctant to be rescued by the famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley in 1888. Possibly because of the arrival of Stanley with his forces, Emin had to contend with disaffection among his own troops. On April 10, 1889, he and Stanley, with some 1,500 others, left the region and crossed over to the eastern African coast, arriving at Bagamoyo (in present-day Tanzania) on December 4, 1889.

The German government then asked him to undertake an expedition to equatorial Africa to secure territories south of and along Lake Victoria to Lake Albert. Soon after the expedition started, however, an Anglo-German agreement was signed (July 1, 1890) excluding Lake Albert from German influence. After experiencing difficulties with German authorities in Tanganyika, he crossed into the Congo Free State (May 1891) and on his journey to the western African coast was murdered by Arab slave raiders, among whom he had many enemies.

Though Emin Pasha published no books, he wrote many valuable papers on Africa for German journals and forwarded rich and varied collections of animals and plants to Europe.
 
Eduard Schnitzer aka Emin PashaHe was born in Opole, Silesia into a middle-class Germano-Jewish family, which moved to Neisse when he was two years of age. After the death of his father in 1845 his mother married a Gentile; she and her offspring were baptized Lutherans. He studied at the universities at Breslau, Königsberg, and Berlin, qualifying as a doctor in 1864. However, he was disqualified from practice, and left Germany for Constantinople, with the intention of entering Ottoman service.

Travelling via Vienna and Trieste, he stopped at Antivari in Montenegro, found himself welcomed by the local community and was soon in medical practice. He put his linguistic talent to good use as well, adding Turkish, Albanian, and Greek to his repertoire of European languages. He became the quarantine officer of the port, leaving only in 1870 to join the staff of Ismail Hakki Pasha, governor of northern Albania, in whose service he travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire, although the details are little-known.

When Hakki Pasha died in 1873, Emin went back to Neisse with the pasha's widow and children, where he passed them off as his own family.  However, he left suddenly in September 1875, reappearing in Cairo and then departing for Khartoum, where he arrived in December. At this point, he took the name "Mehemet Emin" (Arabic Muhammad al-Amin), started a medical practice, and began collecting plants, animals, and birds, many of which he sent to museums in Europe. Although some regarded him as a Muslim, it is not clear if he ever actually converted.

Charles George Gordon, then governor of Equatoria, heard of Emin's presence and invited him to be the chief medical officer of the province; Emin assented and arrived there in May 1876. Gordon immediately sent Emin on diplomatic missions to Buganda and Bunyoro to the south, where Emin's modest style and fluency in Luganda were quite popular.

After 1876, Emin made Lado his base for collecting expeditions throughout the region. In 1878, the Khedive of Egypt appointed Emin as Gordon's successor to govern the province, giving him the title of Bey. Despite the grand title, there was little for Emin to do; his military force consisted of a few thousand soldiers who controlled no more than a mile's radius around each of their outposts, and the government in Khartoum was indifferent to his proposals for development.

The revolt of Muhammad Ahmad that began in 1881 had cut Equatoria off from the outside world by 1883, and the following year Karam Allah marched south to capture Equatoria and Emin. In 1885 Emin and most of his forces withdrew further south, to Wadelai near Lake Albert. Cut off from communications to the north, he was still able to exchange mail with Zanzibar through Buganda. Determined to remain in Equatoria, his communiques, carried by his friend Wilhelm Junker, aroused considerable sentiment in Europe in 1886, particularly acute after the death of Gordon the previous year.

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, led by Henry Morton Stanley, undertook to rescue Emin by going up the Congo River and then through the Ituri Forest, an extraordinarily difficult route that resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the expedition. Precise details of this trek are recorded in the published diaries of the expedition's non-African "officers" (e.g. Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, Captain William Grant Stairs, Mr. A.J. Mounteney Jephson, or Thomas Heazle Parke, surgeon of the expedition). Stanley met Emin in April 1888, and after a year spent in argument and indecision, during which Emin and Jephson were imprisoned at Dufile by troops who mutinied from August to November 1888, Emin was convinced to leave for the coast. They arrived in Bagamoyo in 1890. During celebrations Emin was injured when he stepped through a window he mistook for an opening to a balcony. Emin spent two months in a hospital recovering while Stanley left without being able to bring him back in triumph.

Emin then entered the service of the German East Africa Company and accompanied Dr. Stuhlmann on an expedition to the lakes in the interior, but was killed by two Arabs, likely slave traders, at Kinene.


Mehmed Emin Pasha see Emin Pasha
Eduard Schnitzer see Emin Pasha
Schnitzer, Eduard see Emin Pasha
Emin Effendi see Emin Pasha
Mehmet Emin Pasha see Emin Pasha
Emin Effendi see Emin Pasha


Emir
Emir. Arabic title referring to a governor or military commander, usually with a great deal of authority, but in an ultimately subordinate position.  Emir is often used as the Arabic equivalent of “prince”.  Another meaning of emir is for a handful of descendants of Muhammad.   Emir is also used for tribal chiefs.  Today, the most known emirs are the leaders of Arabic states along the Persian Gulf, in Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (where there are seven of them).   In West Africa, the title is most often associated with the Fula rulers of the provinces (emirates) of northern Nigeria.  

Emir ("commander" or "general", also "prince" ; also transliterated as amir, aamir or ameer) is a high title of nobility or office, used throughout the Arab World and historically in 19th-century Afghanistan and also in the medieval Muslim World. Emirs are usually considered high-ranking sheiks, but in monarchical states the term is also used for princes, with "Emirate" being analogous to principality in this sense. The word is also used as a name (rather than an honorific) in Bosnia and Turkey, as in Emir Niego and Emir Sevinc. While emir is the predominant spelling in English and many other languages (for example, United Arab Emirates), amir, closer to the original Arabic, is more common for its numerous compounds (e.g., admiral) and in individual names. Spelling thus differs depending on the sources consulted.

Amir, meaning "chieftain" or "commander", is derived from the Arabic root Amr, "command". Originally simply meaning commander or leader, usually in reference to a group of people, it came to be used as a title of governors or rulers, usually in smaller states, and in modern Arabic usually renders the English word "prince." The word entered English in 1593, from the French émir.  It was one of the titles or names of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.



amir see Emir.
aamir see Emir.
ameer see Emir.
commander see Emir.
general see Emir.
prince see Emir.


Emir Sultan
Emir Sultan (1368-1429).  Patron saint of Bursa in Turkey.  His mausoleum is a place of pilgrimage.

The Emir Sultan Mosque (Turkish: Emir Sultan Camii) is a mosque in Bursa, Turkey. First built in the 14th century, it was rebuilt in 1804 upon the orders of the Ottoman Sultan Selim III, and re-built again in 1868, along slightly varying plans each time. Emir Sultan, also known as Şemseddin Mehmed Ali el-Hüseyin el Buhari, was a dervish and scholar from Bukhara and also the advisor and son-in-law of the Ottoman Sultan Sultan, Bayezid I.

The present-day mosque, bearing his epithet Emir Sultan, and situated in the Bursa quarter of the same name (although written contiguously, as “Emirsultan”), was built after the collapse of the original 14th century monument in the 1766 earthquake. Although the materials and the location were maintained, the style was adjusted to reflect the baroque design that came into fashion in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. Following the 1855 Bursa earthquake, the mosque and the mausoleum (Turkish: türbe) of Emir Sultan was rebuilt again in 1868 (1285 A.H) by Sultan Abdülaziz.


Empedocles
Empedocles (in Arabic, Anbaduqlis) (c. 490-430 B.C.T.). Historical philosopher.  He plays no role in Islamic philosophy, but his figure was appropriated by late Neoplatonic circles.  Treatises in which Neoplatonic speculations were attributed to Empedocles were translated into Arabic.

Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the origin of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements. He also proposed powers called Love and Strife which would act as forces to bring about the mixture and separation of the elements. These physical speculations were part of a history of the universe which also dealt with the origin and development of life. Influenced by the Pythagoreans, he supported the doctrine of reincarnation. Empedocles is generally considered the last Greek philosopher to record his ideas in verse. Some of his work still survives today, more so than in the case of any other Presocratic philosopher. Empedocles' death was mythologized by ancient writers, and has been the subject of a number of literary treatments.

Anbaduqlis see Empedocles


Endenese
Endenese.  The Endenese live in central Flores, one of the larger islands of the Lesser Sunda in eastern Indonesia.  Their political/administrative area, or regency, is called Kabupaten Ende, with the city of Ende its capital.  They share the regency with half of another ethnic group, the Lionese, who speak a dialect of Endenese, a Malayo-Polynesian language.  About twenty-six percent of the population are Muslims.   The rest are Roman Catholic or traditionalist.  Many Endenese live in other parts of Flores and throughout Indonesia.  In such places as Manggarai (western Flores) and on the north coast of Sumba, entire villages are occupied totally by Muslim Endenese.  

Islam came to Ende during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Unlike in other parts of Indonesia, it came to Ende not from the west but from the east, namely, the island of Solor.  The influence of the Bugis is also discernible in their present culture.  There seems to have occurred a good deal of migration from Sulawesi.  Muslim Endenese has a script similar to that of Buginese, called Iota, probably from the Indonesian word for lontar palm, on whose leaves the script is scratched.

The arrival of Islam and the Portuguese may have occurred virtually at the same time.  The struggle between Muslims and the Christian Portuguese took place on the small island of Pulau Ende.  In 1570, the Portuguese mission built a fortress there called “Fortaleza do Ende Minor,” to prevent attacks by Javanese pirates.  The Muslim inhabitants in 1605 drove the Portuguese from the island, and by 1772 the last Portuguese had been driven from the area.

After the Portuguese came the Dutch.  In 1839, the first contact was made between the Dutch and the Raja of Ende.  By this time, the people of Ende had become almost completely Muslim.

Before the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the island of Flores already had been used as a trading port by the Javanese (especially for the sandalwood derived from Timor). The Portuguese arrived at Melaka (Malacca) in 1511 and the first bishop in Melaka sent three missionaries to Solor, a small island off the east coast of Flores. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Islam is said to have come to Ende. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the island of Flores was a battlefield between the Islamic forces and the Portuguese. Then in the seventeenth century, a third force came onto the scene; namely, the Dutch East India Company, which was established in 1602. In 1613, a Dutch fleet under the command of Apollonius Scot sailed through the islands in the eastern part of Indonesia. Before arriving at Kupang, Scot went to Solor and attacked the fortress there, taking it from the Portuguese. In the decades between 1610 and 1640, the Portuguese in Larantuka and the Dutch on Solor played a kind of seesaw game, which in the long run turned in favor of the Dutch. The fortress on Pulau Ende had been destroyed in the 1620s. After that incident the city of Endeh, where the raj adorn of Ende may already have formed itself, replaced Pulau Ende as a focal point in central Flores. Around this time the Portuguese influence over the area was waning. The Dutch East India Company selected Ende as a rajadom and concluded a formal contract in 1793. The company's involvement in eastern Indonesia ended in 1799 when its charter expired and was replaced by Dutch colonial rule. Prior to 1907, the Dutch principle of government had been minimal direct involvement. In 1907, military reinforcement came from Kupang, and the whole land of Flores was pacified by military force.

According to the founding myth of the rajadom of Ende, a man from overseas (Jawa), who married a daughter of the native lord of the land of Ende, was given power and rights over the the land by his father-in-law and became the founder of the Endenese dynasty.  The first raja is usually named Jari Jawa (probably derived from an Indonesian expression of dari Jawa – “from Java”), but sometimes called Raden Husen, a typical Muslim name. 


Enoch
Enoch.  See Idris.  
Idris see Enoch.
Idriz see Enoch.
Nabiyullah Idris see Enoch.

Entezam, Abbas Amir
Abbas Amir Entezam (Persian: عباس امیرانتظام‎, b. August 18, 1932, Tehran, Iran – d. July 12, 2018, Tehran, Iran) was an Iranian politician who served as deputy prime minister in the Interim Cabinet of Mehdi Bazargan in 1979. In 1981 he was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of spying for the United States, a charge critics suggest was a cover for retaliation against his early opposition to theocratic government in Iran. He was the longest-held political prisoner in the Islamic Republic of Iran. As of 2006 he had been in jail for seventeen years and in and out of jail for an additional ten years, altogether for 27 years.
Entezam was born into a middle-class family in Tehran in 1932.  He studied electro-mechanical engineering at the University of Tehran and graduated in 1955.
In 1956, Entezam left Iran for study at Institute of France (Paris). He then went to the United States and completed his postgraduate education at the University of California in Berkeley. 
After graduation, he remained in the United States and worked as an entrepreneur.
Around 1970, Entezam's mother was dying and he returned to Iran to be with her. Because of his earlier political activities, the Shah's Intelligence Service would not allow him to return to the United States.  He stayed in Iran, marrying, becoming a father and developing a business in partnership with his friend and mentor, Mehdi Bazargan.  Bazargan appointed him as the head of the political bureau of the Freedom Movement of Iran in December 1978, replacing Mohammad Tavasoli.  In 1979, the Shah was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution.  The revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, recently returned to Iran, appointed Bazargan as prime minister of the provisional revolutionary government.  Bazargan, in turn, asked Entezam to be the deputy prime minister and the official spokesperson for the new government. 
While serving as deputy prime minister, in April 1979, Entezam actively advocated the retirement of army officers above the rank of brigadier general.  In 1979, Entezam succeeded in having the majority of the cabinet sign a letter opposing the Assembly of Experts, which was drawing up the new theocratic constitution where democratic bodies were subordinate to clerical bodies. His theocratic opponents attacked him and, in response, in August 1979, Bazargan appointed Entezam to become Iran's ambassador to Denmark.
In December 1979, Bazargan asked Entezam, who had been serving as ambassador to Sweden, to come back quickly to Tehran. Upon returning to Tehran, Entezam was arrested because of allegations based on some documents retrieved from the United States embassy takeover, and imprisoned for a life term.  He was released in 1998 but in less than 3 months, he was rearrested because of an interview with the Tous daily newspaper, one of the reformist newspapers of the time.
In smuggled letters, Entezam related that on three separate occasions, he had been blindfolded and taken to the execution chamber - once being kept "there two full days while the Imam contemplated his death warrant." He spent 555 days in solitary confinement, and in cells so "overcrowded that inmates took turns sleeping on the floor - each person rationed to three hours of sleep every 24 hours." During his imprisonment, Entezam experienced permanent ear damage, developed spinal deformities, and suffered from various skin disorders.
Entezam died of a heart attack in Tehran on July 12, 2018. He was buried the following day in Behesht e Zahra cemetery, with Ayatollah Montazeri's  son leading the funeral prayer.

Enver Pasha
Enver Pasha (İsmail Enver Efendi) (Enver Paşa) (Enver Bey) (November 22, 1881 – August 4, 1922).  Turkish soldier and nationalist leader, who directed the Turkish war effort during World War I.  Enver was born in Istanbul.  He graduated from Turkey’s military academy in 1902 and served in Macedonia, where he fought Greek and Bulgarian nationalist guerrillas.  In 1906, he joined the Young Turks, a secret nationalist group officially known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).  Two years later, he emerged as the principal hero of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which re-established the constitution granted in 1876.  

Enver went to Berlin as military attache in 1909 but rushed back to crush the Istanbul counter-revolution in April.  He fought with distinction against Italy in Libya (1911-12), returning to Istanbul during the disastrous Balkan Wars (1912-13) to participate in a second CUP coup (January 1913).  He recaptured Edirne from Bulgaria in July 1913 and became war minister in 1914, with the task of reforming a demoralized army.

As a member of the Ittihad we Teraqqi Jem‘ iyyeti, Enver was the most consistent advocate of a close alliance with the Central Powers. He helped negotiate Turkey’s alliance with Germany in August 1914, and during World War I he pursued a policy that served German strategy.  His romantic dreams of an empire that would include all the Turkish or all the Islamic peoples, however, ended in failure.  After the Allied victory in 1918, he fled to Germany and then to Central Asia, where he tried to organize Muslim resistance to the Soviets.  In 1918, he fled to Berlin, and in 1921 he went to Bukhara where he was engaged in efforts to mobilize various Ozbeg factions into common resistance against Soviet rule.  He was killed in battle against Soviet forces in Tajikistan (Tadzhikistan) on August 4, 1922.  He lost his life in action near Dushanbe in Tajikistan.  
Ismail Enver Efendi see Enver Pasha
Enver Pasa see Enver Pasha
Enver Bey see Enver Pasha


Erdogan
Erdogan (Recep Tayyip Erdogan) (b. February 26, 1954 in Rize, Turkey).  Turkish politician and leader of the Justice and Development Party, the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AK, for short.  

Erdogan was born in Rize, in northern Turkey, into a lower middle class family.  In 1967, his family moved to Istanbul.  

In 1994, Erdogan became the mayor of Istanbul.  He demonstrated his political abilities while he was mayor.  Unlike the majority of other Turkish politicians, Erdogan proved not to be corrupt.  Among his achievements as mayor was the making of the crowded city of Istanbul into a greener and cleaner city.

Despite his honesty, in 1998, Erdogan was convicted by a court for inciting religious hatred.  He was sentenced to ten (10) months imprisonment, but served only four.  Nevertheless, following his conviction in 1998, Erdogan was subsequently barred from entering parliament and from serving any position in a government.

In 2002, Erdogan’s Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi won a majority representation in the Turkish Parliament, even though it only garnered thirty-six percent (36%) of the votes.

Erdogan went through a change from being an outspoken Islamist into becoming a moderate conservative politician.  Whereas, he earlier worked closely with Necmettin Erbakan, whose Islamist party was outlawed in the late 1990s, in later years, he claimed to be both in favor of continued Turkish membership in NATO, and also in favor of entering the European Union.  Many looked upon Erdogan’s change in politics with suspicion, and awaited a possible change of emphasis following the 2002 elections.  One Islamist issue was however central in his campaign: the abolition of the prohibition against women wearing the head scarf in public buildings.

Erdogan further expressed that he would like to bring in changes to the laws governing political parties, to the election laws, to make Turkey more democratic and pluralist.  He had also expressed the need for Turkey to look for foreign investment actively, an issue -- if involving non-Muslim investments – frowned upon by many Islamists.

Erdogan is generally considered to be among Turkey’s most charismatic politicians, proven by the landslide victory of Adalat ve Kalkinma Partisi in the general elections of late 2002.  

Although Erdogan received a degree in management from the Marmara University in Istanbul, he was often accused of being sparsely educated, speaking only his native language and knowing little about the mechanics of the economy.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a Turkish politician, a former mayor of Istanbul and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey since March 14, 2003. He is also the chairman of the Justice and Development Party (AK Parti), which holds a majority of the seats in the Turkish Parliament.





Born to a Georgian family that moved from Batumi to Rize, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan grew up, in the Kasımpaşa district of Istanbul, a less than affluent neighborhood, famous for its macho honor code. Kasımpaşa men are known to be quick to anger, painfully proud and blunt in word, and he has always been proud of being one.

Erdoğan spent his early childhood in Rize, where his father was a member of the Turkish Coast Guard. The family returned to Istanbul when Erdoğan was 13 years old. As a teenager, he sold lemonade and sesame buns on the streets of Istanbul's rougher districts to earn extra money. Brought up in a observant Muslim family, he graduated from a religious high school (İmam Hatip school) and then studied management at Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences (now it is known as Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences). In his youth, Erdoğan played semi-professional football in a local club. The stadium of the local football club of the district he grew up in, Kasımpaşa S.K., a team which is currently playing in the Turkish Süper Lig, is named after him.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan married Emine Erdoğan (née Gülbaran) (b. 1955 in Siirt), whom he met during a conference, on July 4, 1978. The couple has two sons (Ahmet Burak, Necmeddin Bilâl) and two daughters (Esra, Sümeyye).

In high school Erdoğan became known as a fiery orator in the cause of political Islam. He later played on a professional football (soccer) team and attended Marmara University. During this time, he met Necmettin Erbakan, a veteran Islamist politician, and Erdoğan became active in parties led by Erbakan, despite a ban in Turkey on religiously based political parties. In 1994 Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul on the ticket of the Welfare Party. The election of the first-ever Islamist to the mayoralty shook the secularist establishment, but Erdoğan proved to be a competent and canny manager. He yielded to protests against the building of a mosque in the city’s central square but banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in city-owned cafés. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred after reciting a poem that compared mosques to barracks, minarets to bayonets, and the faithful to an army. Sentenced to 10 months in prison, Erdoğan resigned as mayor.
After serving four months of his sentence, Erdoğan was released from prison in 1999, and he reentered politics. When Erbakan’s Virtue Party was banned in 2001, Erdoğan broke with Erbakan and helped form the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP). His party won the parliamentary elections in 2002, but Erdoğan was legally barred from serving in parliament or as prime minister because of his 1998 conviction. A constitutional amendment in December 2002, however, effectively removed Erdoğan’s disqualification. On March 9, 2003, he won a by-election and days later was asked by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to form a new government. Erdoğan took office on May 14, 2003.

As prime minister, Erdoğan toured the United States and Europe in order to dispel any fears that he held anti-Western biases and to advance Turkey’s bid to join the European Union. Although the previous government had refused to allow U.S. troops to be stationed in Turkey during the Iraq War, in October 2003 Erdoğan secured approval for the dispatch of Turkish troops to help keep the peace in Iraq; Iraqi opposition to the plan, however, prevented such a deployment. In 2004 he sought to resolve the issue of Cyprus, which had been partitioned into Greek and Turkish sectors since a 1974 civil war. Erdoğan supported a United Nations plan for the reunification of the island; in April 2004, Turkish Cypriots approved the referendum, but their Greek counterparts rejected it. Tensions between Turkey’s secularist parties and Erdoğan’s AKP were highlighted in 2007, when attempts to elect an AKP candidate with Islamist roots to the country’s presidency were blocked in parliament by an opposition boycott. Erdoğan called for early parliamentary elections, and his party won a decisive victory at the polls in July.

In early 2008 parliament passed an amendment that lifted a ban on the wearing of head scarves—a sign of religion long contested in Turkey—on university campuses. Opponents of the AKP renewed their charges that the party posed a threat to Turkish secular order, and Erdoğan’s position appeared to come under increasing threat. In March the constitutional court voted to hear a case that called for the dismantling of the AKP and banning Erdoğan and dozens of other party members from political life for five years. Erdoğan successfully maintained his position, however, when in July 2008 the court ruled narrowly against the party’s closure and sharply reduced its state funding instead. In September 2010 a package of constitutional amendments championed by Erdoğan was approved by a national referendum. The package included measures to make the military more accountable to civilian courts and to increase the legislature’s power to appoint judges.

While campaigning for parliamentary elections in early 2011, Erdoğan pledged to replace Turkey’s constitution with a new one that would strengthen democratic freedoms. In June 2011 Erdoğan secured a third term as prime minister when the AKP won by a wide margin in parliamentary elections. However, the AKP fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to unilaterally write a new constitution.

May and June 2013 saw protests against the perceived authoritarianism of Erdogan and his policies, starting from a small sit-in in Istanbul in defense of a city park. After the police's intense reaction with tear gas, the protests grew each day that came after. After weeks of deadly clashes in the streets of Istanbul, his government first apologized to the protestors and called for a plebiscite, but then brutally cracked down on the peaceful protesters.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan see Erdogan



Ersoy
Ersoy (Mehmed Akif Ersoy) (Mehmet Akif Ersoy) (b. 1873, Istanbul - d. December 27, 1936, Istanbul).  Turkish Islamist poet.  Born in Istanbul of devout parents, Akif received a secular education, graduating first in his class in 1893 from the Civil School of Veterinary Sciences.  He was a gifted linguist in Arabic, Persian and French, but it was through unrivalled mastery in his native Turkish that Akif was to convey his poetic vision of the ideal Muslim society, based on his study of Islamic doctrine and the Qur’an.  Possessed of conviction and wholehearted commitment, he encapsulated the brooding restlessness of his time – the bitter disappointment and gloomy introspection of the Muslim world, and especially of the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire.  His competent though undistinguished veterinary career (to 1913) was subordinated to his poetic calling, but it nevertheless brought him into close contact with the peoples of the Rumelian, Anatolian, and Arabian provinces, providing valuable insight for his social poetry.

Although publishing from 1893, Akif was long unable, during a period of strict censorship, to put into print his maturing, poetic, social commentary – instead disseminating it privately.  The restoration in 1908 of the 1876 Constitution, however, ushering in the Young Turk era, initiated his literary career proper in verse and prose.  Already Akif was interpreting the crisis of the Ottoman state’s struggle for survival, under variform attack from Christendom, on the religious plane as an issue encompassing the entire Muslim world.  His writing consequently aimed at an order for Muslim society within the ideal of Islamic unity.  His perspective of the disorder in Ottoman society led him to blame not Islam but rather those aspects of the Muslim world created by Muslims and therefore open to correction by them.  Thus, he attributed the failure of education to society’s losing sight of the intellectual in Islam.  While viewed as conservative, Akif was conservative mainly in the sense that he set his revolutionary Islamic thinking within the framework of traditional poetic expression.  His magnum opus, the seven volume Safahat (Phases, 1911-1933), transmuted the lives of real people into a stylized social novel in verse form, composed throughout in polished classical prosody and style and displaying a talent for the use of vignette to inveigh against societal ills.

Akif’s pessimism increased during World War I in response to the collaboration by some Ottoman Muslim Arabs with the Christian Powers.  His Turkish patriotism shocked into being by the loss of empire, he worked as an educator and preacher in the National Struggle (1919-1922) toward the foundation of a new Turkish state; but he was distressed by the emergence of a nationalist, secular republic serving its Muslim citizens, rather than his desired Muslim Turkey leading the community of Islam.  Disappointed, he settled in Egypt in 1925, where he taught Turkish and wrote little.  He was, however, persuaded, despite misgivings, to translate the Qur’an into Turkish under commission from the Turkish government.  This work he eventually completed but retracted, fearing, in his isolation from events, that it might be misused in the state policy of turkification of the language of worship.

Akif was not, nor did he wish to be, aloof from the thinking of his day.  He challenged the current ideologies of Turkism and so-called Westernism.  Yet his strong sense of Turkishness, as in his emphasis on Turkish idiom and vocabulary in composition, manifests itself clearly despite the uncompromising Islamist message of his writing.  Few religious and patriotic poets of this century have surpassed Akif in spiritual depth and nationalist passion, expressed, for example, in the Istiklal Marsi (Independence March), his award-winning poem that was adopted as the Turkish national anthem in 1921.

What endures is the sincerity of the Islamic belief of this Turkish patriot, a man now seen as symbolizing the conjunction of Turkish nationalism and Muslim internationalism.  As such, Akif satisfies the yearning of both learned and unlearned in Turkey in their increasingly defensive reaction against the perceived hostility of the non-Muslim world.  
Mehmed Akif Ersoy see Ersoy
Mehmet Akir Ersoy see Ersoy


Ertogrul
Ertogrul (Ertuğrul) (Ottoman Turkish: (b. 1191/1198, Ahlat – d. 1281, Söğüt).  Father of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. He was the leader of the Kayı clan of the Oghuz Turks. When arriving in Anatolia with his 400 horsemen to aid the Seljuks of Rum against the Byzantines, Ertoğrul set off the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the founding of the Ottoman Empire. Like his son, Osman, and his future descendants, Ertoğrul is often referred to as a Ghazi, a heroic champion fighter for the cause of Islam.

In 1227,  Ertogrul inherited the command of the Kayı tribe of the Oghuz Turks as a result of his assistance to the Seljuks against the Byzantines. Ertoğrul received lands of Karaca Dağ, a mountainous area near Angora (now Ankara), from Ala ad-Din Kay Qubadh I, the Seljuk Sultan of Rum. One account indicates that the Seljuk leader's rationale for granting Ertoğrul land was for Ertoğrul to repel any hostile incursion from the Byzantines or other adversary.  Later, he received the village of Söğüt which he conquered in 1231 together with the surrounding lands. That village became the Ottoman capital in 1299 under Osman I, Ertoğrul's son. Ertoğrul had two other sons, Savdji and Gündüz.

Ertugrul see Ertogrul


Es‘ad Efendi
Es‘ad Efendi (Mehmed Es‘ad Efendi) (1789-1848). Ottoman official historiographer and scholar.  His library is one of the most important private collections in Turkey.  
Mehmed Es‘ad Efendi see Es‘ad Efendi


Esrefoglu
Esrefoglu (d. 1469). Turkish poet.


Estevanico
Estevanico (Mustafa Zemmouri) (Black Stephen) (Esteban) (Esteban the Moor) (Estevan) (Estebanico) (Stephen the Black) Stephen the Moor) (Little Stephen) (c.1500-1539) Moroccan native who was a servant to Panfilo de Narvaez’s ill-fated Florida expedition in 1528.  He later accompanied A. Nunez-Cabeza de Vaca in a transcontinental trip from the Texas coast, near Galveston and the mouth of the San Antonio River, to northeastern Sonora, an eight-year expedition which ended in 1536 in Mexico City.  Despite his service, Estevanico did not obtain his freedom.  While acting as a guide for Friar Marcos de Niza in 1538, it is believed that Estevanico was killed by Zuni Indians in a small village on the upper Rio Grande.

Estevanico was of Berber North African origin, possibly from Azemmour, Morocco. He was the first known person born in North Africa to have arrived in the present-day continental United States. An enslaved servant, he was one of four survivors of the Spanish Narváez expedition and traveled with explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca across the Southwest.

Estevanico was sold into slavery to the Portuguese in the town of Azemmour, a Portuguese enclave on Morocco's Atlantic coast, in 1513, at an early age. Contemporary accounts referred to him as an "Arabized black"; "Moor", sometimes used for Berber natives; and black African. He was raised as a Muslim, but was converted to Roman Catholicism upon enslavement.  In 1520 he was sold to Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, a Spanish nobleman with whom he developed close ties.

Estevanico traveled with Dorantes to Hispaniola and Cuba and with Pánfilo de Narváez's ill-fated expedition of 1527 to colonize Florida and the Gulf Coast. Estevanico became the first person born in Africa known to have set foot in the present continental United States. He and Dorantes were two of the expedition's four survivors, after the party attempted to sail to Mexico on makeshift rafts. The group was shipwrecked on Galveston Island and most of the men either drowned, starved, or were killed by natives over the following years. By 1533 only Estevanico, Dorantes, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado survived. Estevanico's ability as a faith healer was said to have helped them with the Indians. The four spent years enslaved by the Ananarivo of the Louisiana Gulf Islands. In 1534 they escaped into the American interior, contacting other Native American tribes along the way. The party traversed the continent as far as present-day southeastern Arizona, and through the Sonoran Desert to the region of Sinaloa in New Spain (present-day Mexico), where they were reunited with countrymen.

In 1539, Estevanico was one of four men who accompanied Marcos de Niza as a guide in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, preceding Coronado. When the others were struck ill, Estevanico continued alone, opening up what is now New Mexico and Arizona. He was killed at the Zuni village of Hawikuh (in present-day New Mexico).
Mustafa Zemmouri see Estevanico
Black Stephen see Estevanico
Esteban the Moor see Estevanico
Stephen the Black see Estevanico
Stephen the Moor see Estevanico
Little Stephen see Estevanico


Eunuchs
Eunuchs.  Castrated human males.  In Southwest Asia, the eunuch was castrated for practical reasons, and served in positions where only castrated men were allowed.  The eunuchs were either guards or servants in harems or chamberlains to kings.  These were the original positions for the eunuchs, but many succeeded in climbing in social status, and could reach positions like bodyguards, confidential advisers, ministers, even generals and admirals.  Many of the advisers under the Ottoman Empire were eunuchs.  

The reasons to castrate men entering such positions, are rather obvious:  For the eunuchs working in the harems, there was a need for men who could not make the women pregnant.  Another reason was that castration made a eunuch's personality was more favorable for important positions.  Additionally, the fact that eunuchs never could have any children made them less threatening for rulers and other important people.  After all, the eunuchs had no sons who could challenge their own sons’ future positions.

There were three levels of castration: (1) Removal of both testicles and penis, leaving the man with only a hole for urination; (2) removal of only testicles before the boy reach puberty, leaving the future man totally non-sexual; and (3) removal of testicles after puberty, leaving the man capable of achieving erection but not being able to ejaculate.

In ancient Egypt, a court officer was called a eunuch whether or not he had been castrated.  However, most were castrated, hence the use of the term.

In 1909, harems were outlawed in the Ottoman Empire.  The outlawing of harems brought to an end a little known chapter in African history.  In the Seraglio -- the grand harem of the Ottoman Sultans -- the guardians of the women were always African eunuchs, and for five hundred years these black sentinels were privy to the most intimate details of one of the most powerful kingdoms on earth.

The first traces of eunuchry appear in Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates together and empty into the Persian Gulf.  During the ninth century B.C.T., Semiramis, the Queen of Assyria, castrated male slaves.  So also did other queens.  It is even believed that the infamous Queen of Sheba castrated her male slaves.

The tradition of eunuchs traveled east, through Persia to China.  Warring tribes, such as the Persians, often castrated their prisoners and offered them, along with the most beautiful virgins from amongst the conquered, to their kings.

In 538 B.C.T., Cyrus, the King of Persia, captured Babylon.  Upon this victory, Cyrus proclaimed that since eunuchs were incapable of procreating and having their own families, they might be the most loyal servants.

With the advent of Christianity, the notion of chastity and the perception of women as obstacles to achieving it encouraged castration.  Tertullian, the second century theologian, declared the Kingdom of Heaven open to eunuchs, encouraging many potential followers of Christ to undergo castration.

During the Renaissance, the Catholic Church began castrating boys to preserve their soprano voices for the papal choir of the Sistine Chapel.  This practice continued until 1878.

In the eighteenth century, some of the most famous opera singers were castrati.  Such individuals as Grimaldi, Farinelli, and Nicolini all achieved fame for the quality of their unnatural but angelic voices.

In Mecca and Medina, several hundred eunuchs were employed by the holy mosques of Islam.  At these mosques, the attendants had to come into contact with women who visited the mosques.  Such contact was not permissible between men and women in Islamic society, especially in a holy place.  Accordingly, the attendants had to be eunuchs -- they had to be something less than men.

In Asia Minor (in Turkey), during the fifth century B.C.T., the priests of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and the Temple of Sybelle were eunuchs.  Later on, the sacred function changed into a form of luxury in Greece and in Rome.

The custom of utilizing eunuchs lingered among the Byzantines and passed on to the Ottoman Turks.  During the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans first began secluding their women, the Byzantines supplied them with eunuchs.  However, soon thereafter, the Ottoman Turks established their own trade in eunuchs.

In China, castration was a well-established practice during the 1300 and 1400s.  The great Muslim Chinese explorer, Zheng He, was a eunuch. However, while the eunuchs in China were all Chinese, in the Ottoman Empire, the eunuchs were anything but Turks.  After all, castration was technically forbidden in Islam.  

At first, the Turks acquired white eunuchs from such conquered Christian areas as Circassia, Georgia, and Armenia.  However, these eunuchs often proved too fragile.  Their mortality rate was extremely high.  Not so with the black eunuchs who apparently manifested more strength and better endurance.

According to the tenets of Islam, slaves captured in war became the property of their captor and, like all property, could be transferred.  Muslim slave traders pursued certain African chiefs who willingly sold their people.  Such transactions established a lucrative trade.

The majority of the slaves came from the lands of Egypt, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Sudan.  The upper reaches of the Nile, Kordofan, Darfur, Dongola, and Lake Chad were particularly noted as being sources for slaves.  The slaves were typically shipped upriver to Alexandria or Cairo, packed spoon fashion in boats.  Another method of transportation was from Abyssinia to the Red Sea ports and eventually to the greatest slave emporiums in Southwest Asia -- Mecca, Medina, Beirut, Smyrna, and Constantinople (Istanbul).

Among the slaves, some young African boys would be selected for castration.  The castration would occur during the transportation of the slaves.  The act of castration itself would typically be performed by Egyptian Christians or Jews since Islam prohibited the practice.

Castration was a risky operation with a high mortality rate.  The mortality rate was exacerbated by the hot, arid climate which made recovery difficult.  Desert sand was considered to be the most effective balm to heal the wounds so the newly castrated were buried up to their necks in desert sand until their wounds healed.  The boys who survived the pain, hemorrhage, and subsequent burial became special -- they became luxury items, bringing enormous profit to the slave traders.  Because they had such great value, black eunuchs generally attracted only the wealthiest of purchasers.  This fact contributed to their eventual positions of power and prestige.  

There were three general categories of eunuchs:

castrati - those with both the penis and testicles removed

spadones - those with only the testicles removed

thlibiae - those whose testicles had been crushed permanently damaging the seminal glands

In the Seraglio -- the grand harem of the Ottoman Sultans -- the white eunuchs served in the Selamlik -- the place where the Sultan met other men.  However, it was the black eunuchs who were entrusted with the harem, the most private part of the kingdom.

Because they were often privy to the most intimate secrets of the harem and also had access to the outer world, the eunuchs became some of the most powerful men in the Ottoman Empire.  The chief black eunuch -- the kislar agasi -- exercised great political power in the court, serving as the most important link between the sultan and his mother.  Officially, his position was the third highest ranking officer in the empire, after the sultan and the grand vizier (prime minister).  

The chief black eunuch was the commander of the corps of baltaci, a pasha, and carried other important titles.  He could approach the sultan at any time and functioned as the private messenger between the sultan and the grand vizier.  The chief black eunuch had access to the valide sultana (the sultan's mother) and served as the liaison between the sultan and his mother.  Any woman within the harem wanting to approach the sultan had to be screened by the chief black eunuch.  He was an extremely wealthy man, greatly feared, and, consequently, the most bribed official in the whole Ottoman Empire.

If any emergency occurred, the kizlar agasi was the only person allowed to enter the harem.  His duties were to protect the women, provide the necessary girl slaves for the harem, oversee the promotion of the women and the eunuchs, act as a witness for the sultan's marriage and birth ceremonies, arrange all the royal ceremonial events, such as circumcision parties, weddings and feasts, and carry out the sentence for harem women accused of crimes.  It was the chief black eunuch who took the girls to the executioner -- who had them put in sacks to be drowned.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the power of the eunuchs grew.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the eunuchs, like the valide sultanas, took advantage of the numerous child sultans, and mentally incompetent ones, to gain political power.  During the Reign of Women (1558-1687), the chief black eunuch was the valide sultana's most intimate and valued accomplice.  

From the early nineteenth century until the fall of the empire, the power of the chief black eunuch declined.  By the early twentieth century, his job was simply to supervise the dress of the women, making sure that it was appropriate; to accompany the women on their outings; to make certain that everything was conducted according to the rules of the Seraglio; to prohibit merchants, workers, and fortune-tellers from entering the harem; to grant or deny permission to women visitors; and to be on call in case something critical happened after midnight.

With the prohibition against harems in 1909, the demise of the eunuchs soon followed.  They, along with their charges, were soon relegated to a minor footnote in history.  
castrati see Eunuchs.
spadones see Eunuchs.
thlibiae see Eunuchs.


Eve
Eve (in Arabic, Hawwa’).  According to the Book of Genesis and the Quran, the first woman created by God, and an important figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Her husband was Adam, from whose rib God used to created her to be Adam's companion. According to the Book of Genesis, Eve succumbed to the serpent's temptation via the suggestion that to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, would improve on the way God had made her, and that she would not die. Eve, believing the lie of the Serpent rather than the earlier instruction from God, shared the fruit with Adam. As a result, the first humans were expelled from the Garden of Eden and were cursed.

Eve is not mentioned by name in the Qur'an, she is nevertheless referred to as Adam's spouse, and Islamic tradition refers to her by an etymologically similar name Hawwāʾ.Thus, mention is found in verses 30-39 of Sura 2, verses 11-25 of Sura 7, verses 26-42 of Sura 15, verses 61-65 of Sura 17, verses 50-51 of Sura 18, verses 110-124 of Sura 20 and in verses 71-85 of Sura 38.

Islamic texts, which include the Qur'an and the books of Sunnah (Hadith), potentially dramatically alter the story of Adam and Eve. In particular, Qur'an absolves Eve from the responsibility of leading Adam to commit the original sin by completely omitting the details of the legend as written in the Book of Genesis. The Qur'an simply blames both of them for the transgression. However, a saying of Prophet Mohammed narrated by Abu Hurairah states: “Narrated Abu Hurairah: The Prophet said, ‘Were it not for Bani Israel, meat would not decay; and were it not for Eve, no woman would ever betray her husband.’" (Sahih Bukhari, Hadith 611, Volume 55). An identical but more explicit version is found in the second most respected book of the prophetic narrations, Sahih Muslim. “Abu Hurairah reported Allah's Messenger as saying: Had it not been for Eve, woman would have never acted unfaithfully towards her husband.” (Hadith 3471, Volume 8). Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others have suggested that these hadiths are weak because they violate universal laws (eg. meat decaying) and the Qur'an.

Traditionally, the final resting place of Eve is said to be the "Tomb of Eve" in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Hawwa’ see Eve


Evliya Celebi
Evliya Celebi (Evliya Chelebi) (March 25, 1611 - 1682/1684). Turkish traveler.  His long journeys within the Ottoman Empire and in the neighboring lands are described in his ten-volume work called Seyahat-name (“Book of Travels”).  He was an imaginative writer with a marked penchant for the wonderful and the adventurous, and his work also offers a wealth of information.

Evliya Celebi was born in Istanbul, the son of the Palace goldsmith.  His skill as a Qur’an reciter having brought him to the notice of Murad IV (1623-1640), he completed his education in the Palace School, finishing as a cadet in the cavalry.  He felt a continued urge to travel.  A dream prompted him to compose (in 1640) a detailed description of Istanbul.  Thereafter, thanks to his mother’s connections and probably his own charm, he attached himself to the entourages of successive dignitaries, to spend the rest of his life on military campaigns and civil errands which took him throughout the Ottoman Empire -- then at its greatest extent -- and beyond.

Celebi’s ten-volume Seyahat-name describes minutely the mounuments of the towns he visited, the customs, dress and language of the inhabitants, and the scenery and crops of each district, giving a unique picture of everyday life.  A taste for tales of wonder and a tendency to exaggerate caused his work to be undervalued, but it was finally printed, in 1896.  Nevertheless, in this work, Celebi does provide a virtual census of Istanbul and the surrounding area during Celebi’s time.  
Evliya Chelebi see Evliya Celebi


Evren
Evren (Kenan Evren) (b. July 17, 1917).  Leader of 1980 coup restoring order to Turkey.  Ahmet Kenan Evren was the seventh president of Turkey; a post he assumed by leading the 1980 military coup.

Kenan Evren was born in Alaşehir, Manisa. After going to elementary school and middle school in Manisa, Balıkesir and Istanbul, he attended military high school in Maltepe, Ankara. In 1938, he graduated from army school and in 1949 from military academy as a staff officer. From 1958 to 1959, he served in the Turkish Brigade in Korea. In 1964 he was made general. Evren served at various posts as Army Chief. He was the commander of Operation Gladio's Turkish branch; the Counter-Guerrilla. The Counter-Guerrilla was an anti-communist "stay-behind" guerrilla force set up with the support of NATO. He became Chief of General Staff in March 1978.

The years leading to the coup were characterized as a fierce struggle between the rightists and leftists. Hoping to see a communist revolution, the left wingers rioted in the streets. On the other hand, the nationalist rightists fought back the left wingers and provoked religious arousal. Universities had taken sides and each became headquarters for either the leftists or rightists. The political leaders Suleyman Demirel and Bülent Ecevit were incapable of controlling the violence.

With the coup came the National Security Council as the ruling body. The council of 1980 was composed of the commanders Kenan Evren, the Chief of Staff and President of the State. The parliament was dissolved.

After the coup, in 1982, Kenan Evren was elected the President of Republic of Turkey on November 7 with the 90% approval of the new constitution that was submitted to a controversial referendum, replacing the older constitution which, according to him, had liberties "luxurious" for Turkey. He suspended many forms of civil liberties and human rights on the grounds that it was necessary to establish stability. He professed great admiration for the founder of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk. However, he shut down many institutions founded by Atatürk and is often accused of deforming the country's legal system against Atatürk's principles. During his military regime, many people were tortured and executed due to their political beliefs.

Evren took strong measures to ensure that the division between the political left and right would not turn into violence again. The new constitution limited the rights and de-politicized the youth.

After his retirement, he moved to the Turkish Mediterranean resort town of Armutalan, Marmaris and took up painting. On August 2, 2006, a reported plan for assassinating Evren was thwarted when two men were apprehended and arrested in Muğla. A previous attempt in 1996 had already been tracked down when two members of the assassination team spoke on a cellphone eavesdropped by the police, and the Islamic call to prayer (adhan) could be heard during their conversation. Since the timing of the adhan was 4–5 minutes after Istanbul, a point slightly more to the west by that time margin was sought and the team members were caught in Marmaris itself.

After Bülent Ecevit's death, he expressed remorse over the arrest of political leaders after the September 12 coup, but defended the coup itself and the 35 executions.
Kenan Evren see Evren

2023: Fadli - Faqir

 Fadli

Fadli (Mehmed Fadli) (Qara Fadli) (d.1563). Turkish poet.  He owes his fame to his mathnawi, “The Rose and the Nightingale.”  Unlike most of his contemporaries, he does not follow any particular Persian model.
Mehmed Fadli see Fadli
Qara Fadli see Fadli


Fahd
Fahd (Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud) (Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques) ( 16 March 1921 – 1 August 2005).  King of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Head of the House of Saud as well as Prime Minister. One of forty-five sons of Saudi founder Ibn Saud, and the fourth of his five sons who ruled the Kingdom (Saud, Faisal, Khalid, Fahad, and Abdullah), Fahd ascended to the throne on the death of his half-brother, King Khalid, on June 13, 1982.

Fahd was born in Riyadh as the eleventh son of the founder of the Saudi kingdom, Ibn Saud.  

In 1953, Fahd was appointed minister of education.  He resigned this position in 1960.  In 1962, Fahd was appointed interior minister.  He was appointed second deputy prime minister in 1967 and first deputy prime minister in 1969.

In 1975, when Khalid ibn Abdul Aziz became king, Fahd was named crown prince.  

In 1981, Fahd introduced a plan for peace in Southwest Asia which demanded that Israel withdraw from the occupied territories and abandon all Jewish settlements in the areas.  The plan was presented to the Arab League.  

In June 1982, Fahd became king of Saudi Arabia after the death of Khalid.  Later, in September of 1982, Fahd’s peace plan was adopted as the common position of the members of the Arab League.

In August 1990, Fahd called for United States help in protection against Iraq, after the invasion of Kuwait.  

In the mid-1990's, Fahd suffered a stroke, and his health began to decline.  Crown prince Abdullah became increasingly responsible for governing the country.  In 2000, Abdullah assumed the title of regent (one who governs in place of the king).

Some of the main issues Fahd encountered as king were strong economic growth built upon income from oil exports and development of alternative sources or revenue.  His politics were friendly towards the United States.  His main opponents were Islamists in his own country and Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein.

Fahd died on August 1, 2005.  He was succeeded by his half brother Abdullah.  Fahd is credited with having modernized Saudi Arabia while guiding it through economic, political, and religious upheavals. 


Faisal
Faisal.  See Faysal.


Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Faiz Ahmed Faiz) (1911-1984). Pakistani poet considered to be one of the most famous modern Urdu poets, though he also wrote in Punjabi. He was born in village Kala Kader Sialkot. Now in Distt Narowal, in the Punjab during British rule (now Pakistan). Faiz was a member of the Anjuman Tarraqi Pasand Mussanafin-e-Hind (Progressive Writers' Movement), and an avowed Marxist. In 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot to Sultan Fatima and he acquired his literary skills from his father.

Following the traditions of the Muslim community in South Asia, Faiz, in his early age, was sent to the Masjid (Mosque) to be oriented with the basics of religious studies by Maulvi Muhammad Ibrahim Mir Sialkoti. Later, he went to the Scotch Mission School, Sialkot, for academic education and, after matriculation, joined the Murray College, Sialkot for intermediate and graduation. He acquired his post-graduate studies from the Government College, Lahore (Master of Arts in English Literature) and the Oriental College, Lahore to achieve another masters degree in Arabic Literature.

In the 1930s Faiz Ahmed Faiz married Alys Faiz, a British woman. They had two daughters Moneeza and Salima.

Faiz started a branch of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Punjab in 1936. Faiz was also an Editor of Mahanama (Monthly) Adab-e-Lateef (1938-1942). Faiz became a lecturer in English at M. A. O. College, Amritsar in 1935 and then at Hailey College of Commerce, Lahore. He briefly joined the British Indian Army and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1944. He resigned from the Army in 1947 and returned to Lahore to become the first editor in chief of the Pakistan Times, a paper started by Mian Iftikharuddin. In 1959, he was appointed Secretary of the Pakistan Arts Council and worked in that capacity until 1962.

Returning from London in 1964 he settled down in Karachi and was appointed Principal at Abdullah Haroon College. He was editor of the monthly magazine Adabe-Latif from 1947 to 1958. Faiz distinguished himself as a journalist and was editor of the Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroze and the weekly Lail-o-Nihar. In the 1965 war between India and Pakistan he worked in an honorary capacity in the Department of Information. In exile he acted as Editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow, London and Beirut.

Faiz wrote poems that opposed the bloodshed occurring in what became Bangladesh during the conflict with Pakistan.

In a certain period of his life, Faiz was a communist and was associated with the Communist Party (CP) of Pakistan. Faiz spent much of the 1950s and 1960s promoting the cause of communism in Pakistan. During the time when Faiz was editor of The Pakistan Times, one of the leading newspapers of the 1950s, he lent editorial support to the CP. He was also involved in the circle lending support to military personnel. This involvement with the CP and Major General Akbar Khan's coup plan lead to his imprisonment.

Faiz was an avowed supporter of Sufism. He had close relations with several Sufi saints of his time.

Faiz was charged with complicity in a failed coup attempt known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in 1951. The jail term gave him a first-hand experience of the harsh realities of life, and provided him with the much-needed solitude to think and write poetry. Two of his greatest works Dast-e-Saba and Zindan-Nama were products of this period of imprisonment.

Faiz's most notable works are

    * Naqsh-e-Faryadi, 1941
    * Dast-e-Saba, 1953
    * Zindan Nama, 1956
    * Mizan, a collection of literary articles, 1956
    * Dast Tah-e-Sang, 1965
    * Sar-e-Wadi-e-Seena, 1971
    * Sham-e-Shehr-e-Yaran, 1979
    * Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981
    * Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984 (A collective work)
    * Pakistani Culture, (Urdu and English)

Faiz was the first Asian poet to be awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, the Soviet Union's equivalent to the Nobel Prize in 1963. Other notable recipients include Pablo Neruda, Nelson Mandela, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Fidel Castro and Nobel Prize winning Chemist Linus Pauling. Before his death in 1984, Faiz was also nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz see Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Faiz Ahmed Faiz see Faiz Ahmad Faiz


Faiz Muhammad Angar
Faiz Muhammad Angar.  Kandahar businessman and member of the Wish Zalmayan (Persian for “Awakening Youth”), a Pashtun political club.  He published the Persian/Pashtu biweekly, Angar in 1951.  However, because Angar was critical of the Afghan government, it was banned after only a few months of existence.  Nur Muhammad Taraki claimed to have contributed an article, “What Do We Want?” that was censored and led to the demise of the paper.  Angar died in the 1970's in Kandahar.  
Angar, Faiz Muhammad see Faiz Muhammad Angar.


Fakhr al-Dawla
Fakhr al-Dawla (b. c. 952 - d. October or November 997) was the Buyid amir of Jibal (976-980, 984-997), Hamadan (984-997) and Gurgan and Tabaristan (984-997). He was the second son of Rukn al-Daula.

In January of 976 Rukn al-Daula met with his eldest son, 'Adud al-Daula, who ruled in Fars. 'Adud al-Daula consented to Rukn al-Daula's request that Fakhr al-Daula be made the ruler of Ray upon his death, while Hamadan would go to a third son, Mu'ayyad al-Daula, in exchange for a promise that both of them would recognize him as senior amir. Only eight months later, Rukn al-Daula died and Fakhr al-Daula succeeded him in Ray.

Fakhr al-Daula's reign was shortened by his attempts to repudiate 'Adud al-Daula's authority over him. He allied with his cousin 'Izz al-Daula, who ruled in Baghdad and was an enemy of 'Adud al-Daula. When the latter was defeated by 'Adud al-Daula in 978, Fakhr al-Daula struck up an alliance with the Ziyarid prince Qabus and asked for support from the Samanids. Mu'ayyad al-Daula, an ally of 'Adud al-Daula, was entrusted by the senior amir to eradicate Fakhr al-Daula's power. He marched into Fakhr al-Daula's territory, forcing the latter to flee to the Ziyarids. Mu'ayyad al-Daula continued his campaign, however, causing both Fakhr al-Daula and Qabus to seek refuge in Samanid Khurasan. Mu'ayyad al-Daula then ruled Ray as 'Adud al-Daula's subordinate.

The deaths of 'Adud al-Daula in 983 and Mu'ayyad al-Daula in 984 gave Fakhr al-Daula the chance to recover his inheritance. Mu'ayyad al-Daula's vizier, Sahib ibn 'Abbad, held a gathering of the army in Gurgan and convinced it to accept Fakhr al-Daula as his late master's successor. Fakhr al-Daula, who was still in Khurasan, traveled to Gurgan, where he was proclaimed amir. This second ascension resulted in him actually possessing more territory than he had owned before his expulsion in 980. In addition to Ray, he now controlled Mu'ayyad al-Daula's holdings of Hamadan, as well as the formerly Ziyarid lands of Gurgan and Tabaristan. Taking the title of Shâhanshâh, he made Sahib ibn 'Abbad his vizier, and took his advice not to restore Qabus to his former territory.

Fakhr al-Daula managed to gain recognition as senior amir by Taj al-Daula and Diya' al-Daula, who had in the years following 'Adud al-Daula's death become the rulers of Khuzestan and Basra respectively. This diplomatic success was of little consequence, however, as the two princes were relatively minor and were forced to seek refuge in Ray when Sharaf al-Daula, who ruled in Fars, expelled them from their provinces. At the same time, Fakhr al-Daula attempted to gain a footing in Samanid Khurasan, by supporting the Turkish rebel Tash in his attempts to recover the governorship of that province. This support did not help him, however, as he was defeated and forced to flee to Gurgan at the end of 987. Fakhr al-Daula made him the governor of Gurgan, where Tash died in 988.

Sharaf al-Daula, who had united Fars and Iraq in 987, had died in 988 and left his brother Baha' al-Daula his empire. Another brother, Samsam al-Daula, seized Fars, Kerman and Khuzestan, depriving Baha' al-Daula of those areas. Fakhr al-Daula attempted to take advantage of their rivalry by invading Khuzestan, with the goal of cutting off Iraq from Fars. This action failed due to the rough terrain and climate, and succeeded only in uniting the two brothers against him.

This threat did not last, however, as Samsam al-Daula and Sharaf al-Daula eventually resumed hostilities against each other. Only a few years later, Samsam al-Daula recognized Fakhr al-Daula as senior amir in an effort to secure his increasingly weak position. This marked the height of Fakhr al-Daula's power. In addition to his own territories, he now had authority over Samsam al-Daula, who ruled Fars, Kerman, Khuzestan, and Oman.

Now the ruler of all of Buyid Iran, Fakhr al-Daula, with the support of his vizier Sahib ibn 'Abbad, decided to undertake a campaign to seize Khurasan from the Samanids. In 994 or 995, he invaded the province, but was to ultimately prove unsuccessful. Mahmud, the son of the Ghaznavid ruler Sebük Tigin, had been appointed by the Samanids as governor of Khurasan, causing the Ghaznavids to support the defense against the invasion. Despite his large amount of forces, Fakhr al-Daula was forced to retreat.

In 995, Sahib ibn 'Abbad died. The vizier had played an important part in maintaining Fakhr al-Daula's grip on Buyid Iran, and his loss was unfortunate. In 997, Fakhr al-Daula died. His eldest son, Majd al-Daula, succeeded him in Ray, while his younger son, Shams al-Daula, succeeded him in Hamadan. Due to their youth, Fakhr al-Daula's wife, the "Sayyida", assumed the regency. Fakhr al-Daula's death marked the beginning of the decline of the Buyids in northern Iran. Shortly afterwards, Qabus managed to restore Ziyarid rule to Gurgan and Tabaristan.


Fakhr al-Din I
Fakhr al-Din I (d. 1544). Druze amir of the Banu Ma‘n, and the ruler of the Shuf in Lebanon.


Fakhr al-Din II
Fakhr al-Din II (Fakhr al-Din II ibn Qurqumaz) (Fakhr-al-Din the Great) (Fakhreddine II) (1572–April 13, 1635).  Lebanese prince, son of Prince Qurqumaz from the Maan Druze dynasty and Princess Nassab. Grandson of Fakhr al-Din I.  Fakhr-al-Din (r.1591-1635) is considered one of the most powerful sovereigns to rule Mount Lebanon in the Early Modern period.

Born in Baakline, after the assassination of his father Korkomaz by the Ottomans, he was raised in the Lebanese village of Ballouneh by Sheikh Ibrahim Abou Sakr, a prominent Christian (Maronite Catholic) from the feudal Khazen clan. His childhoold in Ballouneh fostered his belief in the diversity and pluralism of Lebanon.

Fakhr-al-Din worked on freeing Lebanon from Ottoman occupation, by uniting the different Lebanese lords behind him (Chehab, Harfouch, Hobeiche, Khazen…etc) and crushing all those in opposition (Sifa, Freich, etc.), taking control of their land, and uniting Lebanon's different regions under his authority.

In 1608, Fakhr-al-Din forged an alliance with the Italian duchy of Tuscany.

Fakhr-al-Din's popularity and nationalist ideology scared the Ottomans who gave authority for Ahmad El-Hafez, lord of Damascus, and an enemy of Fakhr-al-Din, to mount an attack on Lebanon in 1613, in collaboration with Youssif Sifa, in order to reduce Fakhr-al-Din's growing power.

Facing Hafez's army of 50,000 men, and with his Lebanese allies unfit for fighting, Fakhr-al-Din chose exile to Italy where in Tuscany he was received by the Medici Family, leaving the state in the hands of his brother Younes and his son Ali. However, Fakhr-al-Din's exile did not prevent the Lebanese army from refusing surrender to Hafez's army, thus maintaining its positions while the military operations raged. Until Prince Younes managed through negotiations and persuasion to bring an end to the killings, securing Hafez's army's retreat.

In Tuscany, Fakhr-al-Din was welcomed by the grand duke Cosimo II, who housed him through his stay. Fakhr-al-Din had wished to plan military operations with Tuscan cooperation to free Lebanon, but was met with a refusal since Tuscany was unable to afford such an expedition, and the prince soon gave up that idea, realizing eventually that such cooperation would only subject Lebanon to new occupation. His stay in Italy at the time though allowed him to explore the era of European cultural revival in the 17th century.

In 1618, political changes in the Ottoman sultanate resulted in the removal of many enemies of Fakhr-al-Din from power, signaling the prince's triumphant return to Lebanon soon afterwards.  Upon his return to Lebanon, he was able quickly to reunite all the lands of Lebanon beyond the boundaries of its mountains.  Having revenge on Youssif Sifa, Fakhr al-Din attacked his stronghold in Akkar, destroying his palaces and taking control of his lands.  Fakhr thereby regained the territories he had to give up in 1613 in Saida, Tripoli, Bekaa among others, and created the greater Lebanon which prospered economically and culturally. Under his rule, printing presses were introduced and Jesuit priests and Catholic nuns encouraged to open schools throughout the land.

In 1623, the prince was betrayed by the Harfouch lords who made arrangements with Mustapha Pasha, Lord of Damascus, to launch an attack against him.  At a battle at Majdel Anjar. Fakhr-al-Din's forces, although outnumbered, managed to capture Pacha and secure for the Lebanese prince and his allies a much needed military victory.

In 1624, Fakhr-al-Din earned his nickname Sultan Al Bar ("Emperor of Land"), given to him by the Turkish sultan who also gave him authority to control large regions of the western levant, extending from Aleppo in the north to Jerusalem in the south. This would not have occurred but for the prince's diplomatic skills in his relations with the sultan.

However, as time passed, the Ottomans seemed uncomfortable with the prince's increasing powers and extended relations with Europe. The promise they had made to the Medici family, regarding the Prince of Lebanon, was ignored. In 1632, Ahmad Koujak was named Lord of Damascus, being a rival of Fakhr-al-Din and a friend of Sultan Murad IV, who ordered Koujak and the sultanate's navy to attack Lebanon and depose Fakhr-al-Din. This time, the prince had decided to remain in Lebanon and resist the offensive, but the death of his son Ali in Wadi el-Taym was the beginning of his defeat. He later took refuge in Jezzine's grotto, closely followed by Koujak who eventually caught up with him and his family.

Fakhr-al-Din finally traveled to Turkey, appearing before the sultan, defending himself so skillfully that the sultan gave him permission to return to Lebanon.

Later though, the sultan changed orders and had Fakhr-al-Din and his family killed on April 13, 1635, in Istanbul, the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, bringing an end to possibly one of the greatest eras in the history of Lebanon, a country which would not regain its natural and current boundaries that Fakhr-al-Din once ruled until Lebanon was proclaimed a republic in 1920.

Fakhr al-Din II ibn Qurqumaz see Fakhr al-Din II
Fakhr-al-Din the Great see Fakhr al-Din II
Fakhreddine II see Fakhr al-Din II

Sultan Al Bar see Fakhr al-Din II
"Emperor of Land" see Fakhr al-Din II


Fakhreddin
Fakhreddin (Rizaeddin Fakhreddin) (1859-1936). Volga-Ural Muslim religious scholar and reformist.  One of the most prominent Muslims of the Volga-Ural region of the Russian empire, Fakhreddin was born on January 17, 1859, in Kichu Chati village in Samara guberniya, the son of Sayfetdin, the village mullah, and Mahuba, the daughter of Ramkol Maksud, imam of Iske Ishtirak village.  It is remarkable that Fakhreddin, an outstanding Islamic scholar, educator, writer, and journalist, was a product of Tatar village madrasahs and never attended school in Kazan or Bukhara.  He studied first at his father’s madrasah but at the age of seven went to study at neighboring villages, ultimately spending ten years at Tuban Chirshili studying Islamic theology, jurisprudence, Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish, while also learning Russian on his own.  He was an avid reader in all these languages and never missed an opportunity to buy books from the itinerant book merchants who frequented Tatar villages.  The library he began to accumulate was further enriched by copies of books he copied by hand.

Upon graduating from the madrasah in 1889, Fakhreddin was appointed imam in the village of Ilbak where, in addition to providing religious guidance to the community, he also taught at the madrasah.  By the time of this appointment, however, Fakhreddin had already attracted the attention of leading scholars such as Shakhabaddin Merjani by publishing works including an Arabic grammar (Kitaba-at-tas’riyf – 1887), a text on methodology (At-tokhfat al-Anisiya – 1887), a book of jurisprudence (Kitaba mokaddima – 1889), and one on social issues (Kitaba ig’tiraf – 1889).  

In 1891, Fakhreddin left Ilbak and moved to Ufa, having been elected a kazi (“judge”) and member of the Religious Board of the Muslims (Muftiat).   This move launched the “first Ufa period” (1891-1906) of his life, characterized by impressive productivity and breadth in his writings.  When Fakhreddin assumed the duties of a kazi, the Muftiat had been in existence for more than a hundred years.  Its rich archives, however, had never been organized, and he began compiling a systematic catalog of its holdings.  He also made copies of those archival materials that interested him most for his personal library.  Energized by the wealth of information that surrounded him in the Muftiat archives and by the ongoing discourse concerning the reasons for the backwardness of Muslims of the Russian empire, Fakhreddin entered a most productive period of his life, marked by the publication of literary works and studies on religion, social issues, and pedagogy, as well as contributions to major Muslim newspapers such as Terjuman, Vaqt, and Sharkiy Rus.

In 1906, Fakhreddin resigned from the Muftiat and moved to Orenburg to become editor of the newspaper Vaqt, a leading forum of Muslim reformism, to which he also contributed under the pseudonym Murat.  In January 1908, he became the chief editor of the bi-monthly journal Shura, retaining that position until the end of 1917, when the last of the journal’s 240 issues appeared.  Fakhreddin chose the name of the journal, meaning “council, forum,” and he acknowledged his intention of opening its pages to all those “interested in bringing science and education to their people.”  Fakhreddin’s own contribution to Shura amounted to some seven hundred pieces ranging from articles on the history of the Turkic peoples, to essays on the social, cultural, political life of the Tatars, to profiles of famous Western and Muslim thinkers.

Fakhreddin welcomed with hope the February 1917 revolution with its promises of liberty for all but watched with anxiety the coming to power of the Bolsheviks in October 1917.  When the first post-revolutionary All-Russian Muslim Congress met in May 1917, Fakhreddin was elected kazi in absentia and in January 1918 moved to Ufa to begin his work at the Muftiat.  This new assignment inaugurated his “second Ufa period” (1918-1936).  In 1922, he was elected mufti and as the head of the Religious Board of the Muslims embarked upon the most difficult period of his life, marked by the twin tragedies of personal poverty and imprisonment and the oppression of Muslim communities under the anti-religious policies of the Soviet government.  He died in Ufa on April 11, 1936, at the age of seventy-seven, leaving a rich legacy as a religious scholar, writer, journalist, and foremost spokesman for the movement of Muslim reformism.  

Fakhreddin published some sixty books and seven hundred articles; he left many unpublished works comprising some forty volumes of manuscript on scraps of paper, since during the last years of his life he lived in such poverty that he was forced to sell some of his books in order to buy bread.  Many of Fakhreddin’s works were so widely read that they were published in ten or twelve editions.  Fakhreddin’s books fall into the following categories:  Islamic history and the history of the Turkic peoples; biographies of famous Muslims; Muslim reformism, education, and curricular reform; enlightenment, women, and the Muslim family; theology, jurisprudence, the Qur’an and the hadith; and social and political issues among Russian Muslims.

Fakhreddin’s thought developed under three equally important influences – Shaykh Merjani, Isma’il Gasprali (Gasprinskii), and Jamal al-Afghani.  Like Merjani, he valued the importance of education, science, and the Russian language.  Fakhreddin accepted only what was scientifically sound and ethically moral, but he always extended tolerance and respect to other people’s ideas.  From Gasprali he acquired the idea of the racial and cultural unity of the Turkic peoples, but he rejected political Pan-Turkism while advocating “social unity” for the Turkic peoples.  Al-Afghani’s emphasis on the need to reconcile Islam and modernity in order to defend the Islamic world against the encroachments of the West appealed to Fakhreddin, who as a Volga-Ural Muslim had experienced at first hand the meaning of Russian encroachment.

The importance of Fakhreddin’s religious writings rests in his emphasis on the integrative capacity of Islam, his restatement of the shari‘a as an all-inclusive concept that integrates the legal and the spiritual into one religious whole, and his advocacy of the codification of Muslim legal practices in Russia.  He advocated reform of the Muslim religious administration to enhance the position of the Religious Board and placing the mufti under its control.  Moreover, he emphasized the importance of having the mufti elected by the community on the basis of his competence in religious and secular sciences rather than accepting the nominee of the Russian government.  Fakhreddin also considered it necessary that the Muftiat supervise Muslim schools and devise a centralized curriculum for them.  His emphasis on ijtihad (creative interpretation of dogma) and on education as a weapon against economic backwardness and political encroachment were perhaps Fakhreddin’s most enduring legacies to the Muslims of the Russian empire.   

 
Rizaeddin Fakhreddin see Fakhreddin


Fakhri
Fakhri (d. c. 1618). Turkish silhouette-cutter.  The art of silhouette cutting was brought from Persia to Turkey in the sixteenth century, and to the west in the seventeenth century.


Fakhr-i Mudabbir
Fakhr-i Mudabbir (Fakhri Mudabbir) (d. c. 1236).  Persian author in India.  He is known for his extensive genealogical tables, extending from the Prophet to the Ghurids, and for his treatise on kingship and statecraft and a rather idealized consideration of the art of war. 


Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed
Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (May 13, 1905 - February 11, 1977).  Fifth president of India (r.1974-1977) and the second Muslim to hold that office.  Born in Delhi and educated in England, Ahmed joined the Congress party rather than the Muslim League upon returning to India and was first elected to the Assam state legislature in 1935.  For most of the next 30 years, Ahmed served in various state ministerial and legal posts.  In 1966, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi included Ahmed in her first cabinet.  Gandhi then secured Ahmed’s election to the presidency in 1974.  In return, Ahmed remained a loyal ally who implemented Gandhi’s emergency rule of 1975-1977.  Ahmed died just before Gandhi’s fall from power in 1977.  

Ahmed was born on May 13, 1905, in Delhi, India, to Colonel Zalnur Ali Ahmed and Ruqqaiya Sultan, the daughter of the Nawab of Loharu, Aizz-uddin Ahmad Khan (r. 1920-1926).  He was educated at Saint Stephen's College and Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge, and subsequently became an active member of the Congress Party. Picked for the presidency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1974, he became the second Muslim to be elected President. He would later use his constitutional authority as head of state to allow her to rule by decree once emergency rule was proclaimed in 1975. He died in office.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pristina, in Kosovo in 1975, during his visit to Yugoslavia.

Ahmed, Fakhruddin Ali see Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed


fakir
fakir (in Arabic, faqir – “poor man”) was the term used to describe a member of any of the Muslim mendicant orders and, by extension, a member of one of the mendicant Hindu orders of India.  As applied specifically to Muslim devotees, the term is used synonymously  with "dervish."  Many fakirs pass their lives as itinerant beggars and preachers, although most Hindu fakirs live under the strictest monastic regimen, devoting themselves to meditation and prayer and practicing the severest forms of asceticism.

A certain class of fakirs, whose only connection with the genuine religious orders is a claim to sanctity, practice such mortifications of the flesh as lying on beds of nails, and perform tricks of sleight of hand, hypnotism, and ventriloquism to promote the collection of alms.  In many regions they are held to be unrivaled in the arts of magic, sorcery, and jugglery.  This type of fakir inspired the use of the term synonymous with “swindler” or “trickster” by confusion with “faker.”  
faqir see fakir
“poor man” see fakir


Falih Rifqi Atay
Falih Rifqi Atay (Falih Rifki Atay) (b. 1894, Istanbul - d. March 20, 1971, Istanbul).  Turkish writer, journalist and politician.  He was a great master of modern Turkish prose.


Atay, Falih Rifqi see Falih Rifqi Atay
Falih Rifki Atay see Falih Rifqi Atay
Atay, Falih Rifki see Falih Rifqi Atay


Fallata
Fallata.  Although strictly signifying the Fulani, the term Fallata is used for Muslim immigrants from the western Sudan, and in particular for those from northern Nigeria.


Faqih, Asad Mansur al-

Sheik Asad Mansur al-Faqih (1909 - April 2, 1988) was the first Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States. 


Sheik Faqih was a delegate to the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945, where he signed the charter on behalf of Saudi Arabia. He was appointed Ambassador to the United States later that year. He served simultaneously as Ambassador to Canada and Mexico and was his country's delegate to the United Nations from 1946 to 1955. He established Saudi embassies in China and Japan and served as chief inspector of diplomatic missions. He retired as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in 1963.

Sheik Faqih was also his country's Chief Justice and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and played a key role in maintaining strong Saudi ties with the Allies during World War II.

A resident of the United States after 1984, Sheik Faqih died of prostate cancer on April 2, 1988 at his home in Walnut Creek, Calif. He was 79 years old.  He was survived by his wife, Yacout; seven children, Aida Abi-Mershed of London, Selma Hassen, Saniya Hamady and Zuheir al-Faqih of Washington, and Dr. Khaled al-Faqih, Ghida Heaps and Mrs. Hoda Cox of Walnut Creek; 20 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.


Faqir of Ipi
Faqir of Ipi (Mirza Ali Khan) (1897-1960).  Pathan mullah and agitator along the Northwestern Frontier of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent.

Faqir of Ipi (born Mirza Ali Khan) was a Pashtun from today's North-Waziristan Pakistan, Federally Administrated Tribal Areas. The Tribal Areas was partially administrated by British India, but was never ruled completely by the English in India. Tribal Areas had unique status of partially independent area. Faqir's followers addressed him as ‘Haji Sahib' (or "Respected Pilgrim"). The village of Ipi is located near Mirali Camp in North Waziristan Agency, Waziristan, from where the Faqir of Ipi started his self styled Jihad against the British government. He waged a highly effective guerrilla warfare against the British Empire throughout the 1930s and 1940s until the British departure in 1947. At one point nearly 40,000 British and Indian troops were reported to be in the field trying to capture him, while he succeeding in evading the tight net surrounding him. His own force of armed tribesmen, probably not exceeding one thousand men, armed with rifles and a few machine-guns, and occasionally one or two pieces of antiquated cannon were fielded against this much larger British army equipped with modern artillery, tanks and aircraft. The Faqir of Ipi was always short of ammunition, had no radio communication, and relied upon a traditional network of informants and messengers for his intelligence while the British had much more sophisticated communications and intelligence capabilities developed in World War II.

Faqir of Ipi was born Mirza Ali Khan in 1897 in Shankai Kairta, which is located near Khajuri Post in North Waziristan Agency. His family was from the Bangal Khel clan of the Haibati Madda Khel section of the Tori Khel Wazirs, which belongs to the greater Utmanzai branch concentrated in North Waziristan. His father was a religious man, named Arsala Khan. Mirza first went to religious schools on the British side of the border, and eventually, to a place near Jalalabad, where he became a Murid (pupil) of the Naqib of Chaharbagh, at the time the most famous and influential religious leader in Afghanistan. In 1923 Mirza Ali Khan performed the Hajj in Mecca and thereafter settled down in the village of Ipi, situated near the British military road connecting Bannu and Razmak. He was known as a peaceful, religious preacher. There he gradually acquired the reputation of saintliness among the clan of Daurs, but not attracting as yet the attention of the authorities as a potential agitator.

In March 1936, however, came the turning point in the Faqir's career. The incident was the trial case of the so-called 'Islam Bibi',the crisis was triggered by the conversion and marriage of a 15-year-old Hindu girl Ram Kori, named and known as Islam Bibi, to a Pashtun school teacher Syed Amir Noor Ali Shah of Bannu. A minor girl still, the British Resident of Waziristan and the Brigade Commander Bannu applied strong political pressure on the Torikhel and Madda Khel Waziris for the release of the girl. The next morning, two companies of Tochi Scouts surrounded the village holding Islam Bibi, and a flight of fully armed RAF Audaxes circled overhead in a show of force. The tribal elders acceded to the Political Agent's plea to allow Islam Bibi to declare her decision in front of a Jirga comprising both sides. Before such a Jirga could be arranged, however, the Deputy Commissioner of Bannu, with the concurrence of the NWFP Government, somehow managed to whisk Islam Bibi and her parents away into the interior of the Punjab.

The school teacher was accused of abduction and arrested. The case reached the court in Bannu city 'amid a blaze of publicity.' The trial magistrate found no evidence to suggest that Islam Bibi left her home under compulsion.

Noor Ali Shah's claim to the girl's custody was dismissed as he could not prove 'legal marriage'. He received two years imprisonment for abduction. This verdict proved the trigger for the Faqir.

The verdict 'enraged' the Muslims - especially the Daur tribesmen, Faqir Ipi's kinsmen, the Daur Maliks and mullahs left the Tochi for the Khaisora Valley to the south to rouse the Torikhel Waziris. The enraged tribesmen mustered two large lashkars 10,000 strong and battled the Bannu Brigade, with heavy casualties on both sides. Widespread lawlessness erupted as tribesmen blocked roads, overran outposts and ambushed convoys. The British retaliated by sending two columns converging in the Khaisora river valley. They suppressed the agitation by imposing fines and by destroying the houses of the ringleaders, including that of the Faqir of Ipi. However, the pyrrhic nature of the victory and the subsequent withdrawal of the troops was credited by the Wazirs to be a manifestation of the Faqir's miraculous powers. He succeeded in inducing a semblance of tribal unity, as the British noticed with dismay, among various sections of Tori Khel Wazirs, the Mahsuds and the Bhittannis. He cemented his position as religious leader by declaring a Jihad against the British. This move also helped rally support from Afghan tribesman across the border.

Soon after the campaign a general uprising broke out throughout Waziristan, realising the futility of confronting the British Army directly especially with their advantage of airpower tribesmen switched to guerrilla warfare. In one attack alone a British convoy of 200 heavy vehicles, escorted by 6 armored cars, was ambushed and wiped out in a narrow defile at Shahpur Tangi. Squadrons of the two air forces (RAF and RIAF) tried many tactics including scorched earth retaliation involving the burning of standing crops with jerry can petrol bombs and the killing of cattle with strafing attacks. This situation continued till Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

During World War II, till as late as 1942, extensive efforts were made by Germany and Italy to ally with the Faqir and organize a full scale tribal uprising against the British. Support included money, weaponry and propaganda. The assistance was limited because of the obvious difficulties in supply and communication. These efforts were followed up primarily by the Italians as the Germans believed a British defeat was inevitable at that stage. However with the advent of the USSR in the war, pressure was put on Afghanistan to halt German and Italian infiltration of the tribal areas.

The creation of Pakistan in 1947 significantly dulled the Faqir's insurgency. As the Government was Muslim led, the religious grounds for the insurgency had been lost. This did not stop the Faqir from causing problems for the Pakistani government until his death. On 4 November 4, 1954 his Commander in Chief, Mehar Dil, surrendered himself personally to the Deputy Commissioner Bannu, and this, in effect, brought the Waziristan insurrection to an end.

The Faqir of Ipi died at night on April 16, 1960. A long term sufferer of asthma during his last days, he became so sick that it was not possible for him to walk for a few steps. People from far away often used to come and see him and ask for his blessing. His funeral prayers or Namaz-I-Janaza was held at Gurwaikht led by Maulavi Pir Rehman. Thousands of people from different places came for his Namaz-I-Janaza. He was buried at Gurwaikht.


Mirza Ali Khan see Faqir of Ipi
Haji Sahib see Faqir of Ipi
Respected Pilgrim see Faqir of Ipi