Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, Thomas Edward (T. E. Lawrence) (T. E. Shaw) (Lawrence of Arabia) (born August 15, 1888, Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales—died May 19, 1935, Clouds Hill, Dorset, England). British intelligence officer who helped inspire the Arab Revolt. T. E. Lawrence was a gifted writer and an advocate of Arab nationalism.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was known as the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia”. He earned this title from his exploits during World War I which led helped drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.
T. E. Lawrence, byname Lawrence Of Arabia, was British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author best known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during World War I and for his account of those activities in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Lawrence was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sara Maden, the governess of Sir Thomas’ daughters at Westmeath, with whom he had escaped from both marriage and Ireland. As “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple had five sons (Thomas Edward was the second) during what was outwardly a marriage with all the benefits of clergy. In 1896, the family settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials to the names) attended the High School and Jesus College. Medieval military architecture was his first interest, and he pursued it in its historical settings, studying crusader castles in France and (in 1909) in Syria and Palestine and submitting a thesis on the subject that won him first-class honors in history in 1910. (It was posthumously published, as Crusader Castles, in 1936.) As a protégé of the Oxford archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, he acquired a demyship (travelling fellowship) from Magdalen College and joined an expedition excavating the Hittite settlement of Carchemish on the Euphrates, working there from 1911 to 1914, first under Hogarth and then under Sir Leonard Woolley, and using his free time to travel on his own and get to know the language and the people. Early in 1914 he and Woolley, and Captain S.F. Newcombe, explored northern Sinai, on the Turkish frontier east of Suez. Supposedly a scientific expedition, and in fact sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund, it was more a map-making reconnaissance from Gaza to Aqaba, destined to be of almost immediate strategic value. The cover study was nevertheless of authentic scholarly significance; written by Lawrence and Woolley together, it was published as The Wilderness of Zin in 1915.
The month the war began, Lawrence became a civilian employee of the Map Department of the War Office in London, charged with preparing a militarily useful map of Sinai. By December 1914 he was a lieutenant in Cairo. Experts on Arab affairs—especially those who had travelled in the Turkish-held Arab lands—were rare, and he was assigned to intelligence, where he spent more than a year, mostly interviewing prisoners, drawing maps, receiving and processing data from agents behind enemy lines, and producing a handbook on the Turkish Army. When, in mid-1915, his brothers Will and Frank were killed in action in France, T.E. was reminded cruelly of the more active front in the West. Egypt at the time was the staging area for Middle Eastern military operations of prodigious inefficiency; a trip to Arabia convinced Lawrence of an alternative method of undermining Germany’s Turkish ally. In October 1916 he had accompanied the diplomat Ronald Storrs on a mission to Arabia, where Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, amīr of Mecca, had the previous June proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Storrs and Lawrence consulted with Ḥusayn’s son Abdullah, and Lawrence received permission to go on to consult further with another son, Fayṣal, then commanding an Arab force southwest of Medina. Back in Cairo in November, Lawrence urged his superiors to abet the efforts at rebellion with arms and gold and to make use of the dissident shaykhs by meshing their aspirations for independence with general military strategy. He rejoined Fayṣal’s army as political and liaison officer.
Lawrence was not the only officer to become involved in the incipient Arab rising, but from his own small corner of the Arabian Peninsula he quickly became—especially from his own accounts—its brains, its organizing force, its liaison with Cairo, and its military technician. His small but irritating second front behind the Turkish lines was a hit-and-run guerrilla operation, focusing upon the mining of bridges and supply trains and the appearance of Arab units first in one place and then another, tying down enemy forces that otherwise would have been deployed elsewhere, and keeping the Damascus-to-Medina railway largely inoperable, with potential Turkish reinforcements thus helpless to crush the uprising. In such fashion Lawrence—“Amīr Dynamite” to the admiring Bedouins—committed the cynical, self-serving shaykhs for the moment to his king-maker’s vision of an Arab nation, goaded them with examples of his own self-punishing personal valor when their spirits flagged, bribed them with promises of enemy booty and English gold sovereigns.
Aqaba—at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea—was the first major victory for the Arab guerrilla forces. They seized it after a two-month march on July 6, 1917. Thenceforth, Lawrence attempted to coordinate Arab movements with the campaign of General Sir Edmund Allenby, who was advancing toward Jerusalem, a tactic only partly successful. In November, Lawrence was captured at Darʿā by the Turks while reconnoitering the area in Arab dress and was apparently recognized and homosexually brutalized before he was able to escape. The experience, variously reported or disguised by him afterward, left real scars as well as wounds upon his psyche from which he never recovered. The next month, nevertheless, he took part in the victory parade in Jerusalem and then returned to increasingly successful actions in which Fayṣal’s forces nibbled their way north, and Lawrence rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
By the time the motley Arab army reached Damascus in October 1918, Lawrence was physically and emotionally exhausted, having forced body and spirit to the breaking point too often. He had been wounded numerous times, captured, and tortured; had endured extremities of hunger, weather, and disease; had been driven by military necessity to commit atrocities upon the enemy; and had witnessed in the chaos of Damascus the defeat of his aspirations for the Arabs in the very moment of their triumph, their seemingly incurable factionalism rendering them incapable of becoming a nation. (Anglo-French duplicity, made official in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence knew, had already betrayed them in a cynical wartime division of expected spoils.) Distinguished and disillusioned, Lawrence left for home just before the Armistice and politely refused, at a royal audience on October 30, 1918, the Order of the Bath and the DSO, leaving the shocked king George V (in his words) “holding the box in my hand.” He was demobilized as a lieutenant colonel on July 31, 1919.
A colonel at 30, Lawrence was a private at 34. In between he lobbied vainly for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (even appearing in Arab robes) and lobbied vainly against the detachment of Syria and Lebanon from the rest of the Arab countries as a French mandate. Meanwhile he worked on his war memoir, acquiring for the purpose a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, effective (for a seven-year term) in November 1919. By that time his exploits were becoming belatedly known to a wide public, for in London in August 1919 an American war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, had begun an immensely popular series of illustrated lectures, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” The latter segment soon dominated the program, and Lawrence, curious about it, went to see it himself.
Lawrence was already on a third draft of his narrative when, in March 1921, he was wooed back to the Middle East as adviser on Arab affairs to the colonial minister, then Winston Churchill. After the Cairo political settlements, which redeemed a few of the idealistic wartime promises Lawrence had made, he rejected all offers of further positions in government; and, with the covert help of his wartime colleague, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, enlisted under an assumed name (John Hume Ross) in the Royal Air Force on Aug. 28, 1922. He had just finished arranging to have eight copies of the revised and rhetorically inflated 330,000-word text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the press of the Oxford Times and was emotionally drained by the drafting of his memoir. Now he was willing to give up his £1,200 Colonial Office salary for the daily two shillings ninepence of an aircraftman, not only to lose himself in the ranks but to acquire material for another book. He was successful only in the latter. The London press found him at the Farnborough base, the Daily Express breaking the story on December 27. Embarrassed, the RAF released him early the next month.
Finding reinstatement impossible, Lawrence looked around for another service and through the intervention of a War Office friend, Sir Philip Chetwode, was able to enlist on March 12, 1923, as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, this time as T.E. Shaw, a name he claimed to have chosen at random, although one of the crucial events of his postwar life was his meeting in 1922, and later friendship with, George Bernard Shaw. (In 1927 he assumed the new name legally.) Posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset, he acquired a cottage nearby, Clouds Hill, which remained his home thereafter. From Dorset he set about arranging for publication of yet another version of Seven Pillars; on the editorial advice of his friends, notably George Bernard Shaw, a sizable portion of the Oxford text was pruned for the famous 128-copy subscription edition of 1926, sumptuously printed and bound and illustrated by notable British artists commissioned by the author.
Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains one of the few 20th-century works in English to make epical figures out of contemporaries. Though overpopulated with adjectives and often straining for effects and “art,” it is, nevertheless, an action-packed narrative of Lawrence’s campaigns in the desert with the Arabs. The book is replete with incident and spectacle, filled with rich character portrayals and a tense introspection that bares the author’s own complex mental and spiritual transformation. Though admittedly inexact and subjective, it combines the scope of heroic epic with the closeness of autobiography.
To recover the costs of printing Seven Pillars, Lawrence agreed to a trade edition of a 130,000-word abridgment, Revolt in the Desert. By the time it was released in March 1927, he was at a base in India, remote from the publicity both editions generated; yet the limelight sought him out. Unfounded rumors of his involvement as a spy in Central Asia and in a plot against the Soviet Union caused the RAF (to which he had been transferred in 1925 on the intervention of George Bernard Shaw and John Buchan with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) to return him to England in 1929. In the meantime, he had completed a draft of a semi-fictionalized memoir of Royal Air Force recruit training, The Mint (published 1955), which in its explicitness horrified Whitehall officialdom and which in his lifetime never went beyond circulation in typescript to his friends. In it he balanced scenes of contentment with air force life with scenes of splenetic rage at the desecration of the recruit’s essential inviolate humanity. He had also begun, on commission from the book designer Bruce Rogers, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose, a task he continued at various RAF bases from Karāchi in 1928 through Plymouth in 1931. It was published in 1932 as the work of T.E. Shaw, but posthumous printings have used both his former and adopted names.
Little else by Lawrence was published in his lifetime. His first postwar writings, including a famous essay on guerrilla war and a magazine serial version of an early draft of Seven Pillars, have been published as Evolution of a Revolt (edited by S. and R. Weintraub, 1968). Minorities (1971) reproduced an anthology of more than 100 poems Lawrence had collected in a notebook over many years, each possessing a crucial and revealing association with something in his life.
Lawrence’s last years were spent among RAF seaplanes and seagoing tenders, although officialdom refused him permission to fly. In the process, moving from bases on the English Channel to those on the North Sea and leading charismatically from the lowest ranks as Aircraftman Shaw, he worked on improved designs for high-speed seaplane-tender watercraft, testing them in rigorous trials and developing a technical manual for their use.
Discharged from the Royal Air Force on February 26, 1935, Lawrence returned to Clouds Hill to face a retirement, at 46, filled alternately with optimism about future publishing projects and a sense of emptiness. To Lady Astor, an old friend, he described himself as puttering about as if “there is something broken in the works . . . my will, I think.” A motorcycling accident on May 13 solved the problem of his future. He died six days later without regaining consciousness.
Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.
Thomas Edward Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence of Arabia see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Shaw see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Shaw, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, Thomas Edward (T. E. Lawrence) (T. E. Shaw) (Lawrence of Arabia) (born August 15, 1888, Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales—died May 19, 1935, Clouds Hill, Dorset, England). British intelligence officer who helped inspire the Arab Revolt. T. E. Lawrence was a gifted writer and an advocate of Arab nationalism.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was known as the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia”. He earned this title from his exploits during World War I which led helped drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.
T. E. Lawrence, byname Lawrence Of Arabia, was British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author best known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during World War I and for his account of those activities in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Lawrence was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sara Maden, the governess of Sir Thomas’ daughters at Westmeath, with whom he had escaped from both marriage and Ireland. As “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple had five sons (Thomas Edward was the second) during what was outwardly a marriage with all the benefits of clergy. In 1896, the family settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials to the names) attended the High School and Jesus College. Medieval military architecture was his first interest, and he pursued it in its historical settings, studying crusader castles in France and (in 1909) in Syria and Palestine and submitting a thesis on the subject that won him first-class honors in history in 1910. (It was posthumously published, as Crusader Castles, in 1936.) As a protégé of the Oxford archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, he acquired a demyship (travelling fellowship) from Magdalen College and joined an expedition excavating the Hittite settlement of Carchemish on the Euphrates, working there from 1911 to 1914, first under Hogarth and then under Sir Leonard Woolley, and using his free time to travel on his own and get to know the language and the people. Early in 1914 he and Woolley, and Captain S.F. Newcombe, explored northern Sinai, on the Turkish frontier east of Suez. Supposedly a scientific expedition, and in fact sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund, it was more a map-making reconnaissance from Gaza to Aqaba, destined to be of almost immediate strategic value. The cover study was nevertheless of authentic scholarly significance; written by Lawrence and Woolley together, it was published as The Wilderness of Zin in 1915.
The month the war began, Lawrence became a civilian employee of the Map Department of the War Office in London, charged with preparing a militarily useful map of Sinai. By December 1914 he was a lieutenant in Cairo. Experts on Arab affairs—especially those who had travelled in the Turkish-held Arab lands—were rare, and he was assigned to intelligence, where he spent more than a year, mostly interviewing prisoners, drawing maps, receiving and processing data from agents behind enemy lines, and producing a handbook on the Turkish Army. When, in mid-1915, his brothers Will and Frank were killed in action in France, T.E. was reminded cruelly of the more active front in the West. Egypt at the time was the staging area for Middle Eastern military operations of prodigious inefficiency; a trip to Arabia convinced Lawrence of an alternative method of undermining Germany’s Turkish ally. In October 1916 he had accompanied the diplomat Ronald Storrs on a mission to Arabia, where Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, amīr of Mecca, had the previous June proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Storrs and Lawrence consulted with Ḥusayn’s son Abdullah, and Lawrence received permission to go on to consult further with another son, Fayṣal, then commanding an Arab force southwest of Medina. Back in Cairo in November, Lawrence urged his superiors to abet the efforts at rebellion with arms and gold and to make use of the dissident shaykhs by meshing their aspirations for independence with general military strategy. He rejoined Fayṣal’s army as political and liaison officer.
Lawrence was not the only officer to become involved in the incipient Arab rising, but from his own small corner of the Arabian Peninsula he quickly became—especially from his own accounts—its brains, its organizing force, its liaison with Cairo, and its military technician. His small but irritating second front behind the Turkish lines was a hit-and-run guerrilla operation, focusing upon the mining of bridges and supply trains and the appearance of Arab units first in one place and then another, tying down enemy forces that otherwise would have been deployed elsewhere, and keeping the Damascus-to-Medina railway largely inoperable, with potential Turkish reinforcements thus helpless to crush the uprising. In such fashion Lawrence—“Amīr Dynamite” to the admiring Bedouins—committed the cynical, self-serving shaykhs for the moment to his king-maker’s vision of an Arab nation, goaded them with examples of his own self-punishing personal valor when their spirits flagged, bribed them with promises of enemy booty and English gold sovereigns.
Aqaba—at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea—was the first major victory for the Arab guerrilla forces. They seized it after a two-month march on July 6, 1917. Thenceforth, Lawrence attempted to coordinate Arab movements with the campaign of General Sir Edmund Allenby, who was advancing toward Jerusalem, a tactic only partly successful. In November, Lawrence was captured at Darʿā by the Turks while reconnoitering the area in Arab dress and was apparently recognized and homosexually brutalized before he was able to escape. The experience, variously reported or disguised by him afterward, left real scars as well as wounds upon his psyche from which he never recovered. The next month, nevertheless, he took part in the victory parade in Jerusalem and then returned to increasingly successful actions in which Fayṣal’s forces nibbled their way north, and Lawrence rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
By the time the motley Arab army reached Damascus in October 1918, Lawrence was physically and emotionally exhausted, having forced body and spirit to the breaking point too often. He had been wounded numerous times, captured, and tortured; had endured extremities of hunger, weather, and disease; had been driven by military necessity to commit atrocities upon the enemy; and had witnessed in the chaos of Damascus the defeat of his aspirations for the Arabs in the very moment of their triumph, their seemingly incurable factionalism rendering them incapable of becoming a nation. (Anglo-French duplicity, made official in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence knew, had already betrayed them in a cynical wartime division of expected spoils.) Distinguished and disillusioned, Lawrence left for home just before the Armistice and politely refused, at a royal audience on October 30, 1918, the Order of the Bath and the DSO, leaving the shocked king George V (in his words) “holding the box in my hand.” He was demobilized as a lieutenant colonel on July 31, 1919.
A colonel at 30, Lawrence was a private at 34. In between he lobbied vainly for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (even appearing in Arab robes) and lobbied vainly against the detachment of Syria and Lebanon from the rest of the Arab countries as a French mandate. Meanwhile he worked on his war memoir, acquiring for the purpose a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, effective (for a seven-year term) in November 1919. By that time his exploits were becoming belatedly known to a wide public, for in London in August 1919 an American war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, had begun an immensely popular series of illustrated lectures, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” The latter segment soon dominated the program, and Lawrence, curious about it, went to see it himself.
Lawrence was already on a third draft of his narrative when, in March 1921, he was wooed back to the Middle East as adviser on Arab affairs to the colonial minister, then Winston Churchill. After the Cairo political settlements, which redeemed a few of the idealistic wartime promises Lawrence had made, he rejected all offers of further positions in government; and, with the covert help of his wartime colleague, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, enlisted under an assumed name (John Hume Ross) in the Royal Air Force on Aug. 28, 1922. He had just finished arranging to have eight copies of the revised and rhetorically inflated 330,000-word text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the press of the Oxford Times and was emotionally drained by the drafting of his memoir. Now he was willing to give up his £1,200 Colonial Office salary for the daily two shillings ninepence of an aircraftman, not only to lose himself in the ranks but to acquire material for another book. He was successful only in the latter. The London press found him at the Farnborough base, the Daily Express breaking the story on December 27. Embarrassed, the RAF released him early the next month.
Finding reinstatement impossible, Lawrence looked around for another service and through the intervention of a War Office friend, Sir Philip Chetwode, was able to enlist on March 12, 1923, as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, this time as T.E. Shaw, a name he claimed to have chosen at random, although one of the crucial events of his postwar life was his meeting in 1922, and later friendship with, George Bernard Shaw. (In 1927 he assumed the new name legally.) Posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset, he acquired a cottage nearby, Clouds Hill, which remained his home thereafter. From Dorset he set about arranging for publication of yet another version of Seven Pillars; on the editorial advice of his friends, notably George Bernard Shaw, a sizable portion of the Oxford text was pruned for the famous 128-copy subscription edition of 1926, sumptuously printed and bound and illustrated by notable British artists commissioned by the author.
Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains one of the few 20th-century works in English to make epical figures out of contemporaries. Though overpopulated with adjectives and often straining for effects and “art,” it is, nevertheless, an action-packed narrative of Lawrence’s campaigns in the desert with the Arabs. The book is replete with incident and spectacle, filled with rich character portrayals and a tense introspection that bares the author’s own complex mental and spiritual transformation. Though admittedly inexact and subjective, it combines the scope of heroic epic with the closeness of autobiography.
To recover the costs of printing Seven Pillars, Lawrence agreed to a trade edition of a 130,000-word abridgment, Revolt in the Desert. By the time it was released in March 1927, he was at a base in India, remote from the publicity both editions generated; yet the limelight sought him out. Unfounded rumors of his involvement as a spy in Central Asia and in a plot against the Soviet Union caused the RAF (to which he had been transferred in 1925 on the intervention of George Bernard Shaw and John Buchan with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) to return him to England in 1929. In the meantime, he had completed a draft of a semi-fictionalized memoir of Royal Air Force recruit training, The Mint (published 1955), which in its explicitness horrified Whitehall officialdom and which in his lifetime never went beyond circulation in typescript to his friends. In it he balanced scenes of contentment with air force life with scenes of splenetic rage at the desecration of the recruit’s essential inviolate humanity. He had also begun, on commission from the book designer Bruce Rogers, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose, a task he continued at various RAF bases from Karāchi in 1928 through Plymouth in 1931. It was published in 1932 as the work of T.E. Shaw, but posthumous printings have used both his former and adopted names.
Little else by Lawrence was published in his lifetime. His first postwar writings, including a famous essay on guerrilla war and a magazine serial version of an early draft of Seven Pillars, have been published as Evolution of a Revolt (edited by S. and R. Weintraub, 1968). Minorities (1971) reproduced an anthology of more than 100 poems Lawrence had collected in a notebook over many years, each possessing a crucial and revealing association with something in his life.
Lawrence’s last years were spent among RAF seaplanes and seagoing tenders, although officialdom refused him permission to fly. In the process, moving from bases on the English Channel to those on the North Sea and leading charismatically from the lowest ranks as Aircraftman Shaw, he worked on improved designs for high-speed seaplane-tender watercraft, testing them in rigorous trials and developing a technical manual for their use.
Discharged from the Royal Air Force on February 26, 1935, Lawrence returned to Clouds Hill to face a retirement, at 46, filled alternately with optimism about future publishing projects and a sense of emptiness. To Lady Astor, an old friend, he described himself as puttering about as if “there is something broken in the works . . . my will, I think.” A motorcycling accident on May 13 solved the problem of his future. He died six days later without regaining consciousness.
Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.
Thomas Edward Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence of Arabia see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Shaw see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Shaw, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Laye, Camara
Laye, Camara (Camara Laye) (b. January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea] - d. February 4, 1980, Senegal). Guinean novelist. Laye comes from a Malinke family from Kouroussa, Upper Guinea. His father was a jeweller and goldsmith, his mother a smith’s daughter. A Muslim by faith, Laye attended a Qur’anic school, then the French primary school at Kouroussa. At Conakry technical college, he received a first class proficiency certificate in mechanical engineering. He was sent to France to the Central School of Automobile Engineering at Argenteuil. On his own initiative, he entered the Ecole Ampere in Paris, working for the diploma in industrial instruction. To earn a living, Laye had to work for eight months as a mechanic at the Simca works, while following evening courses at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. He finally studied for a specialized diploma in engineering at the Technical College for Aeronautics and Automobile Construction.
Laye’s literary career began in his Paris student days. Unlike most other African writers -- some of whom have adversely criticized Laye -- Laye is politically non-partisan, and remarkable rather for his psychological insight. His first book, L’enfant noir (The Dark Child) (1953) is an autobiographical novel for which Laye, still a student in Paris, was awarded the Charles Veillon prize. It is remarkable for its picture of the traditions of Malinke civilization. Laye’s second novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) (1954) is an allegory about man’s search for God, written in a colloquial griot style, in which the adventures of the hero are developed in a narrative sometimes comic, sometimes touching, and always with immense verve.
Camara Laye (born January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea]; d. February 4, 1980, Senegal) was an African writer from Guinea. During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.
Camara Laye was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name -- Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fourteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.
In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.
In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.
In 1975 Laye became acutely ill with a kidney condition that had first troubled him back in 1965, but he could not afford the treatment in Europe that he needed. Reine Carducci, wife of the Italian UNESCO ambassador to Senegal and an admirer of Laye's work, became conscious of Laye's plight and championed an appeal for financial support. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, made the largest contribution; Laye later wrote his biography and expressed his admiration for the leader. Laye received the necessary medical care in Paris and returned periodically for further treatment.
In 1971, Laye began writing Le Maître de la parole (1978). Though eschewing collaboration with the many exiled enemies of Touré, Laye in an interview did not hide his debt to Kafka and the surrealists and his intention to mingle fiction and reality into a new and greater truth in the effort to express his own outrage at what had happened to his homeland. An honest artist and a sensitive participant in the pains of a post-colonial world, Laye produced works that speak about the clamor and that are more poignant because of their intense dream-like style. Eventually, Laye's ill health caught up with him and he died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, where he is buried.
Laye, Camara (Camara Laye) (b. January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea] - d. February 4, 1980, Senegal). Guinean novelist. Laye comes from a Malinke family from Kouroussa, Upper Guinea. His father was a jeweller and goldsmith, his mother a smith’s daughter. A Muslim by faith, Laye attended a Qur’anic school, then the French primary school at Kouroussa. At Conakry technical college, he received a first class proficiency certificate in mechanical engineering. He was sent to France to the Central School of Automobile Engineering at Argenteuil. On his own initiative, he entered the Ecole Ampere in Paris, working for the diploma in industrial instruction. To earn a living, Laye had to work for eight months as a mechanic at the Simca works, while following evening courses at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. He finally studied for a specialized diploma in engineering at the Technical College for Aeronautics and Automobile Construction.
Laye’s literary career began in his Paris student days. Unlike most other African writers -- some of whom have adversely criticized Laye -- Laye is politically non-partisan, and remarkable rather for his psychological insight. His first book, L’enfant noir (The Dark Child) (1953) is an autobiographical novel for which Laye, still a student in Paris, was awarded the Charles Veillon prize. It is remarkable for its picture of the traditions of Malinke civilization. Laye’s second novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) (1954) is an allegory about man’s search for God, written in a colloquial griot style, in which the adventures of the hero are developed in a narrative sometimes comic, sometimes touching, and always with immense verve.
Camara Laye (born January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea]; d. February 4, 1980, Senegal) was an African writer from Guinea. During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.
Camara Laye was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name -- Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fourteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.
In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.
In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.
In 1975 Laye became acutely ill with a kidney condition that had first troubled him back in 1965, but he could not afford the treatment in Europe that he needed. Reine Carducci, wife of the Italian UNESCO ambassador to Senegal and an admirer of Laye's work, became conscious of Laye's plight and championed an appeal for financial support. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, made the largest contribution; Laye later wrote his biography and expressed his admiration for the leader. Laye received the necessary medical care in Paris and returned periodically for further treatment.
In 1971, Laye began writing Le Maître de la parole (1978). Though eschewing collaboration with the many exiled enemies of Touré, Laye in an interview did not hide his debt to Kafka and the surrealists and his intention to mingle fiction and reality into a new and greater truth in the effort to express his own outrage at what had happened to his homeland. An honest artist and a sensitive participant in the pains of a post-colonial world, Laye produced works that speak about the clamor and that are more poignant because of their intense dream-like style. Eventually, Laye's ill health caught up with him and he died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, where he is buried.
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al-
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al- (713-791). Transmitter of hadith and a jurisconsult of Persian origin in Egypt. He is ranked among the leading authorities on questions of religious knowledge in the early years of the Islamic Empire.
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al- (713-791). Transmitter of hadith and a jurisconsult of Persian origin in Egypt. He is ranked among the leading authorities on questions of religious knowledge in the early years of the Islamic Empire.
Laz
Laz (Lazi) (Lazepe) (Lazlar) (C'ani). People of South Caucasian stock, now dwelling in the southeastern corner of the shores of the Black Sea, in the region called in Ottoman times Lazistan.
The Laz (Lazi are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Black Sea coastal regions of Turkey and Georgia. One of the chief tribes of ancient kingdom of Colchis, the Laz were initially early adopters of Christianity, and most of them subsequently converted to Sunni Islam during Ottoman rule of Caucasus in the 16th century.
The Laz of Turkey form two principal groups. One of these are indigenous to the eastern Black Sea province formerly known as Lazistan (modern Rize and Artvin provinces). The other group fled the Russian expansion later in the 19th century and settled in Adapazarı, Sapanca, Yalova and Bursa, in western and eastern parts of the Black Sea and Marmara regions, respectively. The Laz speak the Laz language, related to Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan (South Caucasian languages). Laz identity in Georgia has largely merged with a Georgian identity and the meaning of "Laz" is seen as merely a regional category, and are mainly concentrated in Ajaria.
The Laz were converted to Christianity while living under the Byzantine Empire and kingdom of Colchis. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of Laz became Sunni Muslims of Hanafi madh'hab, and were ruled as part of the Lazistan sanjak. There is also a very limited number of Christian Laz in Georgia. The Laz are primarily designated as fisherfolk by the Turkish public (in fact, they are mostly farmers of tea and maize) because anchovies constitute an important part of their diet.
Lazi see Laz
Lazepe see Laz
Lazlar see Laz
C'ani see Laz
Laz (Lazi) (Lazepe) (Lazlar) (C'ani). People of South Caucasian stock, now dwelling in the southeastern corner of the shores of the Black Sea, in the region called in Ottoman times Lazistan.
The Laz (Lazi are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Black Sea coastal regions of Turkey and Georgia. One of the chief tribes of ancient kingdom of Colchis, the Laz were initially early adopters of Christianity, and most of them subsequently converted to Sunni Islam during Ottoman rule of Caucasus in the 16th century.
The Laz of Turkey form two principal groups. One of these are indigenous to the eastern Black Sea province formerly known as Lazistan (modern Rize and Artvin provinces). The other group fled the Russian expansion later in the 19th century and settled in Adapazarı, Sapanca, Yalova and Bursa, in western and eastern parts of the Black Sea and Marmara regions, respectively. The Laz speak the Laz language, related to Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan (South Caucasian languages). Laz identity in Georgia has largely merged with a Georgian identity and the meaning of "Laz" is seen as merely a regional category, and are mainly concentrated in Ajaria.
The Laz were converted to Christianity while living under the Byzantine Empire and kingdom of Colchis. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of Laz became Sunni Muslims of Hanafi madh'hab, and were ruled as part of the Lazistan sanjak. There is also a very limited number of Christian Laz in Georgia. The Laz are primarily designated as fisherfolk by the Turkish public (in fact, they are mostly farmers of tea and maize) because anchovies constitute an important part of their diet.
Lazi see Laz
Lazepe see Laz
Lazlar see Laz
C'ani see Laz
Lazar
Lazar (Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović) (Tsar Lazar) (1329 - June 28 [O. S. June 15], 1389). King of Serbia who was defeated by Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389. Lazar died in 1389.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović, also known as Tsar Lazar, was a medieval Serbian knez (Knyaz), ruler of Moravian Serbia, a part of the once powerful Serbian Empire under Dušan the Mighty. Lazar fought at the Battle of Kosovo with an army half the size of the Ottoman Empire and perished, together with most of the Serbian nobility and Murad I, which eventually led to the fall of Serbia as a sovereign state. The Battle of Kosovo is regarded as highly important for Serb national consciousness and the knez is venerated as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a hero in Serbian epic poetry.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović see Lazar
Hrebelianovic, Stefan Lazar see Lazar
Tsar Lazar see Lazar
Lazar (Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović) (Tsar Lazar) (1329 - June 28 [O. S. June 15], 1389). King of Serbia who was defeated by Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389. Lazar died in 1389.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović, also known as Tsar Lazar, was a medieval Serbian knez (Knyaz), ruler of Moravian Serbia, a part of the once powerful Serbian Empire under Dušan the Mighty. Lazar fought at the Battle of Kosovo with an army half the size of the Ottoman Empire and perished, together with most of the Serbian nobility and Murad I, which eventually led to the fall of Serbia as a sovereign state. The Battle of Kosovo is regarded as highly important for Serb national consciousness and the knez is venerated as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a hero in Serbian epic poetry.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović see Lazar
Hrebelianovic, Stefan Lazar see Lazar
Tsar Lazar see Lazar
Lemano
Lemano (Liamano). In Brazil, the spiritual and temporal head of Muslim slaves brought over during the colonial period. He was the supreme chief and master of worship among the Hausa and Fulani blacks. In religious ceremonies, the lemano directed the prayers and the reading of the Qur’an, while a chorus of women chanted in Arabic.
Liamano see Lemano
Lemano (Liamano). In Brazil, the spiritual and temporal head of Muslim slaves brought over during the colonial period. He was the supreme chief and master of worship among the Hausa and Fulani blacks. In religious ceremonies, the lemano directed the prayers and the reading of the Qur’an, while a chorus of women chanted in Arabic.
Liamano see Lemano
Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus (Joannes Leo Africanus) (Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi) (1488/1494-1552/1554). Name by which the author of the Descrittione dell’ Africa (The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained) is generally known. His original name is al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati (or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wizaz al-Fasi). He was born in (Granada) Spain to a wealthy family which moved to Fez after the Christian conquest of Spain in 1492. Leo Africanus was educated in Fez. He attended the University of al-Karaouine. He left there to travel in North Africa, working as a clerk and a notary.
As a young man, Leo Africanus accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions throughout the Maghreb, reaching as far south as Timbuktu. Between 1510 and 1513, he travelled into the Sudanic region of West and Central Africa, crossing the desert via Sijilmasa, Taghaza and Timbuktu. He visited the Songhay empire at its zenith, as well as, Mali, the Hausa states, and the Bulala state which occupied the former Kanem empire. Returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was captured by Sicilian corsairs (Christian pirates) near Tunis and taken to Rome. There he was presented to Pope Leo X. Leo Africanus had carried with him an Arabic draft of his Descrittione. Pope Leo recognizing this achievement, freed Leo Africanus and baptized him in 1520. He was given the name Giovanni Leoni, but became known as Leo Africanus.
He completed his book in 1526; it was published in Italian in 1550 and in English in 1660. The work was of seminal value, although Leo perpetuated the error of al-Idrisi in asserting that the Niger River flowed from east to west. The error was not corrected until Mungo Park saw the Niger in 1796. A misreading of Leo Africanus is also largely responsible for the vaunted reputation which Timbuktu had among Europeans in later years.
Before 1550, Leo Africanus returned to Tunis, and probably spent the last years of his life practicing his ancestral faith, Islam. The Descrittione remained for centuries a major source of the Islamic world, and is still cited by historians and geographers of Africa. As an explorer of Western and Central Sudanic regions, Leo Africanus was the most important chronicler of that part of Africa between Ibn Battuta (c.1350) and the nineteenth century European explorers.
Africanus, Leo see Leo Africanus
Africanus, Joannes Leo see Leo Africanus
Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi see Leo Africanus
Fasi, Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Zayyati, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Leoni, Giovanni see Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus (Joannes Leo Africanus) (Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi) (1488/1494-1552/1554). Name by which the author of the Descrittione dell’ Africa (The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Therein Contained) is generally known. His original name is al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati (or al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wizaz al-Fasi). He was born in (Granada) Spain to a wealthy family which moved to Fez after the Christian conquest of Spain in 1492. Leo Africanus was educated in Fez. He attended the University of al-Karaouine. He left there to travel in North Africa, working as a clerk and a notary.
As a young man, Leo Africanus accompanied his uncle on diplomatic missions throughout the Maghreb, reaching as far south as Timbuktu. Between 1510 and 1513, he travelled into the Sudanic region of West and Central Africa, crossing the desert via Sijilmasa, Taghaza and Timbuktu. He visited the Songhay empire at its zenith, as well as, Mali, the Hausa states, and the Bulala state which occupied the former Kanem empire. Returning from the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was captured by Sicilian corsairs (Christian pirates) near Tunis and taken to Rome. There he was presented to Pope Leo X. Leo Africanus had carried with him an Arabic draft of his Descrittione. Pope Leo recognizing this achievement, freed Leo Africanus and baptized him in 1520. He was given the name Giovanni Leoni, but became known as Leo Africanus.
He completed his book in 1526; it was published in Italian in 1550 and in English in 1660. The work was of seminal value, although Leo perpetuated the error of al-Idrisi in asserting that the Niger River flowed from east to west. The error was not corrected until Mungo Park saw the Niger in 1796. A misreading of Leo Africanus is also largely responsible for the vaunted reputation which Timbuktu had among Europeans in later years.
Before 1550, Leo Africanus returned to Tunis, and probably spent the last years of his life practicing his ancestral faith, Islam. The Descrittione remained for centuries a major source of the Islamic world, and is still cited by historians and geographers of Africa. As an explorer of Western and Central Sudanic regions, Leo Africanus was the most important chronicler of that part of Africa between Ibn Battuta (c.1350) and the nineteenth century European explorers.
Africanus, Leo see Leo Africanus
Africanus, Joannes Leo see Leo Africanus
Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi see Leo Africanus
Fasi, Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Zayyati, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al- see Leo Africanus
Leoni, Giovanni see Leo Africanus
Lewend
Lewend. Name given to two kinds of Ottoman daily-wage irregular militia, one sea-going, the other land-based. The word may derive in its maritime sense from the Italian levantino.
Levantino see Lewend.
Lewend. Name given to two kinds of Ottoman daily-wage irregular militia, one sea-going, the other land-based. The word may derive in its maritime sense from the Italian levantino.
Levantino see Lewend.
Liberation Movement of Iran
Liberation Movement of Iran (Freedom Movement of Iran) (Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran). Iranian political party whose program is based on a modernist interpretation of Islam.
The Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) was founded in May 1961 by leaders of the former National Resistance Movement (NRM). A few days after the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Muhammad Musaddiq) in August 1953, with his close collaborators either under arrest of surveillance, some of Mossadegh’s less politically prominent followers founded the NRM as a secret organization to uphold the nationalist cause under the repressive conditions of the new dictatorship. Among its leaders were the cleric Sayyid Riza Zanjani, Mehdi Barargan, the lawyer Hasan Nazih, and Muhammd Rahim ‘Ata’i. The NRM had two social bases: the bazaar and students. Key NRM leaders came from a bazaar background, which facilitated contacts with Mossadeghist merchants who financed the movement; students, for their part, demonstrated. Based in Tehran, the NRM was also present in a few provincial centers, most notably Mashhad, where ‘Ali Shari‘ati was active.
The NRM organized protest demonstrations against the regime on the occasions of Mossadegh’s trial (fall 1953), Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran (December 1953), sham parliamentary elections (winter 1954), and the new oil agreement that resolved Iran’s dispute with Great Britain (spring 1954). Internal disagreements -- between secular and Islamist activists, between opponents and proponents of collaboration with the communists -- weakened the movement, and after 1954 the increasing efficiency of the shah’s security apparatus caused NRM activity to decline, until the organization was crushed in 1957 when all top activists were arrested and held prisoner for eight months.
When in 1960, Mossadeghists became active again in the course of the shah’s liberalization policies, carried out in response to President John F. Kennedy’s election, conflict arose between erstwhile NRM leaders and the National Front’s old guard of former cabinet members. Two issues were at stake. First, NRM veterans and their young sympathizers in the National Front wanted to target the shah personally, whereas the more moderate National Front leaders tried to spare him, hoping that he would become a constitutional monarch. Second, the core members of the former NRM, most whom were also active in Islamic circles, wanted to mobilize Iranians by appealing to their religious values, a policy the National Front’s secular leadership rejected. The dispute came to a head in May 1961 when Mehdi Bazargan, Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, Hazan Nazih, Yad Allah Sahabi, and eight other men formed a separate party, the LMI. The party was defined as Muslim, Iranian, constitutionalist, and Mossadeghist.
During the nineteen months of its activity, the LMI opposed the shah’s regime and its policies, calling on the ruler to respect the constitution. When the shah named the independent politician ‘Ali Amini prime minister, the LMI tried to accommodate him so as to weaken the shah, unlike the National Front, which considered Amini too pro-American. Amini’s resignation in July 1962, heralded the end of liberalization in Iran. In January 1963, the shah had the entire leadership of the LMI and the National Front arrested, after both had sharply criticized his planned referendum on what would become the “White Revolution.” Although the secular politicians were soon released, the LMI leaders were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.
After the violent repression of the June 1963 riots, which propelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into the political limelight and in which certain lower level LMI activists participated, the shah’s rule became increasingly autocratic. This made any oppositional party activity in Iran impossible. Several young LMI militants concluded that the legal constitutional methods of their elders having failed, armed struggle was now called for: they formed the Mujahidin-i Khalq. Others decided to continue the struggle against the shah abroad and formed an LMI-in-exile. The chief initiators of this move were ‘Ali Shari‘ati, Ibrahim Yazdi, and Mustafa Chamran. The first was active in Paris until his return to Iran in 1964. Yazdi’s base was Houston, Texas, but he was also in close contact with Khomeini in Iraq. Chamran first worked in the United States but then moved to Lebanon, where he had a leading role in the formation of the Amal movement.
The LMI reconstituted itself in 1977 with Bazargan as chairman. In 1978, the party would have preferred to accept the shah’s offer of free elections, but recognizing Khomeini’s hold on Iranian public opinion, it went along with Bazargan’s rejection of elections. In the last weeks of the shah’s regime, LMI figures played a leading role in negotiating with striking oil workers, military leaders, and United States diplomats to smooth the transfer of power to the revolutionaries. In 1979, most LMI leaders held key positions in the provisional government. After its ouster in the wake of the seizure of the United States hostages in November, the LMI gradually became an oppositional force. It was represented in the first parliament of the Islamic Republic but barred from presenting candidates in subsequent elections. After 1982, it sharply criticized Khomeini’s unwillingness to end the Iran-Iraq War. After that its activities were sharply restricted, and many of its leaders were in and out of prison.
Remarkable continuity characterizes the LMI in its two periods of activity. The party’s program derives from a liberal interpretation of Shi‘a Islam that rejects both royal and clerical dictatorship in favor of political and economic liberalism, which are both considered more conducive to the flowering of Islamic values than coercion. Based on a relatively narrow constituency of religiously inclined professionals, the party’s major weakness has been its inability to engender mass support.
Freedom Movement of Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran
FMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
LMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran
Liberation Movement of Iran (Freedom Movement of Iran) (Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran). Iranian political party whose program is based on a modernist interpretation of Islam.
The Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) was founded in May 1961 by leaders of the former National Resistance Movement (NRM). A few days after the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (Muhammad Musaddiq) in August 1953, with his close collaborators either under arrest of surveillance, some of Mossadegh’s less politically prominent followers founded the NRM as a secret organization to uphold the nationalist cause under the repressive conditions of the new dictatorship. Among its leaders were the cleric Sayyid Riza Zanjani, Mehdi Barargan, the lawyer Hasan Nazih, and Muhammd Rahim ‘Ata’i. The NRM had two social bases: the bazaar and students. Key NRM leaders came from a bazaar background, which facilitated contacts with Mossadeghist merchants who financed the movement; students, for their part, demonstrated. Based in Tehran, the NRM was also present in a few provincial centers, most notably Mashhad, where ‘Ali Shari‘ati was active.
The NRM organized protest demonstrations against the regime on the occasions of Mossadegh’s trial (fall 1953), Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran (December 1953), sham parliamentary elections (winter 1954), and the new oil agreement that resolved Iran’s dispute with Great Britain (spring 1954). Internal disagreements -- between secular and Islamist activists, between opponents and proponents of collaboration with the communists -- weakened the movement, and after 1954 the increasing efficiency of the shah’s security apparatus caused NRM activity to decline, until the organization was crushed in 1957 when all top activists were arrested and held prisoner for eight months.
When in 1960, Mossadeghists became active again in the course of the shah’s liberalization policies, carried out in response to President John F. Kennedy’s election, conflict arose between erstwhile NRM leaders and the National Front’s old guard of former cabinet members. Two issues were at stake. First, NRM veterans and their young sympathizers in the National Front wanted to target the shah personally, whereas the more moderate National Front leaders tried to spare him, hoping that he would become a constitutional monarch. Second, the core members of the former NRM, most whom were also active in Islamic circles, wanted to mobilize Iranians by appealing to their religious values, a policy the National Front’s secular leadership rejected. The dispute came to a head in May 1961 when Mehdi Bazargan, Sayyid Mahmud Taleqani, Hazan Nazih, Yad Allah Sahabi, and eight other men formed a separate party, the LMI. The party was defined as Muslim, Iranian, constitutionalist, and Mossadeghist.
During the nineteen months of its activity, the LMI opposed the shah’s regime and its policies, calling on the ruler to respect the constitution. When the shah named the independent politician ‘Ali Amini prime minister, the LMI tried to accommodate him so as to weaken the shah, unlike the National Front, which considered Amini too pro-American. Amini’s resignation in July 1962, heralded the end of liberalization in Iran. In January 1963, the shah had the entire leadership of the LMI and the National Front arrested, after both had sharply criticized his planned referendum on what would become the “White Revolution.” Although the secular politicians were soon released, the LMI leaders were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment.
After the violent repression of the June 1963 riots, which propelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into the political limelight and in which certain lower level LMI activists participated, the shah’s rule became increasingly autocratic. This made any oppositional party activity in Iran impossible. Several young LMI militants concluded that the legal constitutional methods of their elders having failed, armed struggle was now called for: they formed the Mujahidin-i Khalq. Others decided to continue the struggle against the shah abroad and formed an LMI-in-exile. The chief initiators of this move were ‘Ali Shari‘ati, Ibrahim Yazdi, and Mustafa Chamran. The first was active in Paris until his return to Iran in 1964. Yazdi’s base was Houston, Texas, but he was also in close contact with Khomeini in Iraq. Chamran first worked in the United States but then moved to Lebanon, where he had a leading role in the formation of the Amal movement.
The LMI reconstituted itself in 1977 with Bazargan as chairman. In 1978, the party would have preferred to accept the shah’s offer of free elections, but recognizing Khomeini’s hold on Iranian public opinion, it went along with Bazargan’s rejection of elections. In the last weeks of the shah’s regime, LMI figures played a leading role in negotiating with striking oil workers, military leaders, and United States diplomats to smooth the transfer of power to the revolutionaries. In 1979, most LMI leaders held key positions in the provisional government. After its ouster in the wake of the seizure of the United States hostages in November, the LMI gradually became an oppositional force. It was represented in the first parliament of the Islamic Republic but barred from presenting candidates in subsequent elections. After 1982, it sharply criticized Khomeini’s unwillingness to end the Iran-Iraq War. After that its activities were sharply restricted, and many of its leaders were in and out of prison.
Remarkable continuity characterizes the LMI in its two periods of activity. The party’s program derives from a liberal interpretation of Shi‘a Islam that rejects both royal and clerical dictatorship in favor of political and economic liberalism, which are both considered more conducive to the flowering of Islamic values than coercion. Based on a relatively narrow constituency of religiously inclined professionals, the party’s major weakness has been its inability to engender mass support.
Freedom Movement of Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran
FMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
LMI see Liberation Movement of Iran
Nehzat-e Azadi-e Iran see Liberation Movement of Iran
Limba
Limba. The oldest but third largest ethnic group in the Republic of Sierra Leone (after the Temne and Mende) are the Limba. Perhaps seventy percent (70%) of the Limba are Muslims. Except for a handful in Guinea, all live within Sierra Leone’s borders.
Limba traditions connect them with archaeological discoveries dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries. Limba claim they originated from roughly what is Limba country today. But the original Limba clan, which appears to have been the Kamara, gradually expanded with infusion from Manding-speaking peoples coming from the north, from the direction of the Mali Empire in about the eighteenth century. This gave rise to new ruling families among the various Limba subgroups, who now hold the positions of paramount chiefs, as the traditional rulers, usually descended from pre-colonial kings and rulers, are now called. Among the Wara Wara, the Mansaray clan holds this position. Among the Biriwa, it is the Conteh (or Konde, as it is called in Francophone areas). The Safroko have the Bangura as the ruling clan, while the Kargbo clan dominates the Tonko Limba.
These Mandinka related clans were bearers of at least rudimentary elements of Islam as they migrated southward. Some, like the Conteh of Biriwa, were said to be Muslims when they reached Limba country, though they quickly abandoned Islam. Some Islamic words and elements like baraka (blessing) and almamy (chief) were thus initially brought into Limba culture. Traders, clerics and karamokos (Islamic teachers and sometimes charm makers) visiting these areas also contributed to the Islamization process.
Large scale conversion to Islam, however, occurred in the late nineteenth century with the wars of expansion of the Mandinka conqueror, Samory Toure of Konyan country, presently in the Republic of Guinea. Samory’s empire, in 1886, embraced the entire Limba country, and one element of his control was conversion to Islam. Today, although Christianity has taken some root, especially among the Tonko and Sela Limba, the majority of Limba are Muslims. Among the more prominent Limba is Siaka Stevens, the first president of Sierra Leone, and Joseph Momoh, the second president of Sierra Leone.
Limba. The oldest but third largest ethnic group in the Republic of Sierra Leone (after the Temne and Mende) are the Limba. Perhaps seventy percent (70%) of the Limba are Muslims. Except for a handful in Guinea, all live within Sierra Leone’s borders.
Limba traditions connect them with archaeological discoveries dating back to the seventh and eighth centuries. Limba claim they originated from roughly what is Limba country today. But the original Limba clan, which appears to have been the Kamara, gradually expanded with infusion from Manding-speaking peoples coming from the north, from the direction of the Mali Empire in about the eighteenth century. This gave rise to new ruling families among the various Limba subgroups, who now hold the positions of paramount chiefs, as the traditional rulers, usually descended from pre-colonial kings and rulers, are now called. Among the Wara Wara, the Mansaray clan holds this position. Among the Biriwa, it is the Conteh (or Konde, as it is called in Francophone areas). The Safroko have the Bangura as the ruling clan, while the Kargbo clan dominates the Tonko Limba.
These Mandinka related clans were bearers of at least rudimentary elements of Islam as they migrated southward. Some, like the Conteh of Biriwa, were said to be Muslims when they reached Limba country, though they quickly abandoned Islam. Some Islamic words and elements like baraka (blessing) and almamy (chief) were thus initially brought into Limba culture. Traders, clerics and karamokos (Islamic teachers and sometimes charm makers) visiting these areas also contributed to the Islamization process.
Large scale conversion to Islam, however, occurred in the late nineteenth century with the wars of expansion of the Mandinka conqueror, Samory Toure of Konyan country, presently in the Republic of Guinea. Samory’s empire, in 1886, embraced the entire Limba country, and one element of his control was conversion to Islam. Today, although Christianity has taken some root, especially among the Tonko and Sela Limba, the majority of Limba are Muslims. Among the more prominent Limba is Siaka Stevens, the first president of Sierra Leone, and Joseph Momoh, the second president of Sierra Leone.
Lipqa
Lipqa (Lipka) (Lubqa) (Lipkowie) (Lipcani) (Muslimi). Name given to the Tatars who since the fourteenth century inhabited Lithuania, and later the eastern and southeastern lands of old Poland up to Podolia, and after 1672 also partly Moldavia and Dobruja.
The Lipka Tatars are a group of Tatars who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of 14th century. The first settlers tried to preserve their shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars - this time, Muslims, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great. These Tatars first settled around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas and later spread to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. From the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars. While maintaining their religion, they united their fate with that of the mainly Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the Battle of Grunwald onwards the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland.
The Lipka Tatar origins can be traced back to the descendant states of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan - the White Horde, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate and Kazan Khanate. They initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses and gardening skills. Throughout centuries they resisted assimilation and kept their traditional lifestyle. Over time, they lost their original Tatar language and for the most part adopted Polish. There are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in today's Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, as well as their communities in the United States and Canada.
Lubqa see Lipqa
Lipka see Lipqa
Lipkowie see Lipqa
Lipcani see Lipqa
Muslimi see Lipqa
Lipqa (Lipka) (Lubqa) (Lipkowie) (Lipcani) (Muslimi). Name given to the Tatars who since the fourteenth century inhabited Lithuania, and later the eastern and southeastern lands of old Poland up to Podolia, and after 1672 also partly Moldavia and Dobruja.
The Lipka Tatars are a group of Tatars who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of 14th century. The first settlers tried to preserve their shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars - this time, Muslims, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great. These Tatars first settled around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas and later spread to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Poland. From the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars. While maintaining their religion, they united their fate with that of the mainly Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the Battle of Grunwald onwards the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland.
The Lipka Tatar origins can be traced back to the descendant states of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan - the White Horde, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate and Kazan Khanate. They initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses and gardening skills. Throughout centuries they resisted assimilation and kept their traditional lifestyle. Over time, they lost their original Tatar language and for the most part adopted Polish. There are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in today's Belarus, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, as well as their communities in the United States and Canada.
Lubqa see Lipqa
Lipka see Lipqa
Lipkowie see Lipqa
Lipcani see Lipqa
Muslimi see Lipqa
Liu Chih
Liu Chih (Liu Chiai-lien). Eighteenth century Chinese Muslim scholar who was active as translator, theologian, philosopher and biographer of the Prophet.
Liu Chiai-lien see Liu Chih
Chih, Liu see Liu Chih
Chiai-lien, Liu see Liu Chih
Liu Chih (Liu Chiai-lien). Eighteenth century Chinese Muslim scholar who was active as translator, theologian, philosopher and biographer of the Prophet.
Liu Chiai-lien see Liu Chih
Chih, Liu see Liu Chih
Chiai-lien, Liu see Liu Chih
Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan (Liaqat ‘Ali Khan) (Liaquat Ali Khan) (b. October 1, 1895, Karnal, India - d.
October 16, 1951, Rawalpindi, Pakistan). Chief lieutenant in the All-India Muslim League and the first prime minister of Pakistan. A member of a wealthy, landed family, he was educated at Aligarh and Oxford, and trained as a lawyer before entering politics. He joined the Muslim League in 1923 and sided with Muhammad Ali Jinnah when the party temporarily split four years later. As the general-secretary of the league from 1936 to independence, he played an influential role in shaping the party’s program. Like Jinnah, his political views changed from seeking safeguards for Muslims within a united India to advocating partition and the creation of Pakistan. Liaqat served in the legislature of the United Provinces from 1926 to 1940 and in the Indian Legislative Assembly from 1940 to 1947, where he was the deputy leader of the league’s parliamentary party. In 1946, he was appointed the finance minister in the interim government of India created under the Cabinet Mission Plan. With independence, he became the prime minister of Pakistan and, following Jinnah’s death in 1948, the leader of the country. In that capacity, he was instrumental in organizing Pakistan’s new government and defining its policies. He continued to serve as prime minister until his assassination in 1951.
Liaquat Ali Khan (Liāqat Alī Khān) rose to political prominence as a member of the All India Muslim League. He played a vital role in the independence of India and Pakistan. In 1947, he became the prime minister of Pakistan. He was regarded as the right-hand man of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and first governor-general of Pakistan. Liaquat was given the titles of Quaid-e-Millat (Leader of the Nation), and posthumously Shaheed-e-Millat (Martyr of the Nation).
Liaquat was a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, Oxford University and Middle Temple, London. He rose into prominence within the Muslim League during the 1930s. Significantly, he is credited with persuading Jinnah to return to India, an event which marked the beginning of the Muslim League's ascendancy and paved the way for the Pakistan movement. Following the passage of the Pakistan Resolution in 1940, Liaquat assisted Jinnah in campaigning for the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims. In 1947, the British Raj was divided into the modern-day states of India and Pakistan.
Following independence, India and Pakistan came into conflict over the fate of Kashmir. Khan negotiated extensively with India's then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and pushed for the referral of the problem to the United Nations. During his tenure, Pakistan pursued close ties with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aftermath of Pakistan's independence also saw internal political unrest and even a foiled military coup against his government. After Jinnah's death, Khan assumed a more influential role in the government and passed the Objectives Resolution, a precursor to the Constitution of Pakistan. He was assassinated in 1951.
Liaqat 'Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liaquat Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liaquat Ali Khan (Liāqat Alī Khān) rose to political prominence as a member of the All India Muslim League. He played a vital role in the independence of India and Pakistan. In 1947, he became the prime minister of Pakistan. He was regarded as the right-hand man of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and first governor-general of Pakistan. Liaquat was given the titles of Quaid-e-Millat (Leader of the Nation), and posthumously Shaheed-e-Millat (Martyr of the Nation).
Liaquat was a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, Oxford University and Middle Temple, London. He rose into prominence within the Muslim League during the 1930s. Significantly, he is credited with persuading Jinnah to return to India, an event which marked the beginning of the Muslim League's ascendancy and paved the way for the Pakistan movement. Following the passage of the Pakistan Resolution in 1940, Liaquat assisted Jinnah in campaigning for the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims. In 1947, the British Raj was divided into the modern-day states of India and Pakistan.
Following independence, India and Pakistan came into conflict over the fate of Kashmir. Khan negotiated extensively with India's then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and pushed for the referral of the problem to the United Nations. During his tenure, Pakistan pursued close ties with the United Kingdom and the United States. The aftermath of Pakistan's independence also saw internal political unrest and even a foiled military coup against his government. After Jinnah's death, Khan assumed a more influential role in the government and passed the Objectives Resolution, a precursor to the Constitution of Pakistan. He was assassinated in 1951.
Liaqat 'Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Liaquat Ali Khan see Liyaqat ‘Ali Khan
Lodis
Lodis (Lodhis). Afghan tribe and dynasty which ruled over parts of north India (r.1451-1526). The first ruler Bahlul (r. 1451-1489) captured Delhi in 1451. He saw himself as a chief of chiefs rather than an absolute autocrat, but his son Sikandar II (r. 1489-1517) considered himself a fully-fledged Sultan. Sultan Ibrahim II (r. 1517-1526) fell in battle, and the sultanate passed into the hands of the Mughals.
Afghan migrations to India began during the early Turkish period. By the time of Muhammad ibn Tughluq the Afghans constituted an important segment of the nobility. An Afghan merchant, Malik Bahram, joined the service of a governor of Multan and served him so devotedly that he entrusted his son Malik Kala with the administration of Daurala. Malik Kala’s son Bahlul founded the Lodi dynasty in 1451 and ruled until 1489. He was followed by Sikandar (1489-1519) and Ibrahim (1517-1526). Ibrahim met his end at the hands of Babur at the Battle of Panipat (1526), following which the Lodi dynasty yielded its place in India to the Mughal empire.
The Lodis had come to power at a time when the Delhi sultanate had shrunk in dimensions and the contumacious activities of chieftains in the Punjab and the growing ambitions of the Sharqis in the east had created formidable problems. The Lodis sought to introduce principles characteristic of Afghan tribalism into Indian polity. In matters of succession, suitability rather than the principle of heredity guided their action. The army of the Delhi sultanate under them changed its character from “the king’s army” to “tribal militia.” Some of the privileges and prerogatives of the sultan came to be commonly used by the nobles, and the king came to be looked upon as primus inter pares -- "first among equals". The three Lodi rulers, however, demonstrated different attitudes in dealing with the nobility – Bahlul’s despotism was tempered by Afghan traditions of tribal equality; Sikandar made the nobles recognize the superior status of the monarch; and Ibrahim’s overbearing attitude alienated them.
Lodi is a common family name amongst Pashtuns, often linked with the title "Khan" to form the surname "Lodi Khan" or "Khan Lodi".
However, the surname "Khan" alone does not necessarily mean that the individual is Lodi.
Today, the Lodi are found primarily in Afghanistan, the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and the Punjab region. They usually practice Islam, the majority being Sunni.
Lodhis see Lodis
Lodis (Lodhis). Afghan tribe and dynasty which ruled over parts of north India (r.1451-1526). The first ruler Bahlul (r. 1451-1489) captured Delhi in 1451. He saw himself as a chief of chiefs rather than an absolute autocrat, but his son Sikandar II (r. 1489-1517) considered himself a fully-fledged Sultan. Sultan Ibrahim II (r. 1517-1526) fell in battle, and the sultanate passed into the hands of the Mughals.
Afghan migrations to India began during the early Turkish period. By the time of Muhammad ibn Tughluq the Afghans constituted an important segment of the nobility. An Afghan merchant, Malik Bahram, joined the service of a governor of Multan and served him so devotedly that he entrusted his son Malik Kala with the administration of Daurala. Malik Kala’s son Bahlul founded the Lodi dynasty in 1451 and ruled until 1489. He was followed by Sikandar (1489-1519) and Ibrahim (1517-1526). Ibrahim met his end at the hands of Babur at the Battle of Panipat (1526), following which the Lodi dynasty yielded its place in India to the Mughal empire.
The Lodis had come to power at a time when the Delhi sultanate had shrunk in dimensions and the contumacious activities of chieftains in the Punjab and the growing ambitions of the Sharqis in the east had created formidable problems. The Lodis sought to introduce principles characteristic of Afghan tribalism into Indian polity. In matters of succession, suitability rather than the principle of heredity guided their action. The army of the Delhi sultanate under them changed its character from “the king’s army” to “tribal militia.” Some of the privileges and prerogatives of the sultan came to be commonly used by the nobles, and the king came to be looked upon as primus inter pares -- "first among equals". The three Lodi rulers, however, demonstrated different attitudes in dealing with the nobility – Bahlul’s despotism was tempered by Afghan traditions of tribal equality; Sikandar made the nobles recognize the superior status of the monarch; and Ibrahim’s overbearing attitude alienated them.
Lodi is a common family name amongst Pashtuns, often linked with the title "Khan" to form the surname "Lodi Khan" or "Khan Lodi".
However, the surname "Khan" alone does not necessarily mean that the individual is Lodi.
Today, the Lodi are found primarily in Afghanistan, the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and the Punjab region. They usually practice Islam, the majority being Sunni.
Lodhis see Lodis
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