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Was the Ancient south Arabian Mḏqnt the Islamic Miḥrāb?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Extract

Abī Manṣur al-Tha'ālibī devotes twenty pages of Yatīmat al-dahr to selections from al-qaṣīda al-sāsāniyya of Abū Dulaf al-Khazraji, the fourth century A.H. poet, who prided himself on being a member of the ‘world brotherhood’ of beggars and impostors known by the ‘royal’ name of banū sāsān. This group of people used a special jargon, munākāh, a considerable part of which is preserved in this poem of Abk Dulaf's.

Type
Notes and Communications
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1962

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References

page 331 note 2 Muḥammad, Abd al-Malik b., ManḦūr, Abū, al-Tha'ālibī, Yatīmat al-dahr fī maḥāsin ’ahl al-‘asr, Cairo, 1947, iii, 354–73.Google Scholar

page 331 note 3 Banī sāsāna wa’L-ḥāmī al-ḥima fī sālifi al-‘aṣri, Ibid., 355.

page 331 note 4 Ibid., 369; and cf. the following paragraph.

page 331 note 5 Ibid.

page 331 note 6 , perfect . simply means to seek shelter, to shelter, from wind, cold, or rain behind a wall or a tree or the like; cf. Lisān, s.v. Cf. fa-lammā lahu simtu ramlat-in, rendered by Krenkow: ‘ Then when morning came there crept stealthily to him(a huntsman) accustomed to the sands ’ (The poems of Ṭufayl … and aṭ-ṬirimmāḤ, edited and translated by Krenkow, F. (Gibb Memorial Series, xxv), London, 1927. p. 171Google Scholar of Arabic text and 74 of translation). Krenkow's rendering of as ‘ crept stealthily ’ is loose and rather dramatized.The real sense is ‘ hid for him, laid in ambush for him ’.

page 332 note 1 Serjeant, R. B., ‘Miḥirā’, BSOAS, xxn, 3, 1959, 439–53;CrossRefGoogle Scholar cf., particularly, 439 and 448 and n. 1 therein.

page 332 note 2 ibid., 444–6.

page 332 note 3 has been rendered sometimes singular; cf. ‘ Gebetsplatz ’, in RES, 4198 bis, 3–4; and sometimes plural; cf. (in CIH, 648, 3) rendered by Rhodokanakis, St., n, 34,‘ Betplätze’. In n. 2 on the same page Rhodokanakis considers to be the singular. But in CIH, 660, 4, the only text in which we have an authentic and unrestored reading, is clearly plural; cf. the text thereof on p. 333. , pi. would be like Arabic madrasah, pl. madāris. The occurrence of in Arabic need not necessarily strengthen the argument fcr considering ESA singular. The term , CIH, 619, 4; RES, 4050, 2, and 4714 need not have a sense basically different from , as Rhodokanakis, St., I, 69, suggested. In CIH,619, is associated with a burial place, and also most probably in RES, 4050. In Fakhry, 72 is associated in the same manner with a burial place. Perhaps was smaller and less spacious than a . One can compare here Arabic maktab, school, and kuttāb, a small and elementary school, often in villages, in one room and run by one teacher.

page 332 note 4 Rhodokanakis, , St., n, 34, n. 2; idem, ‘Zur Interpretation altsüidarabischer Inschriften, I’,WZKM, XLIII, 1936, 49.Google Scholar

page 332 note 5 St., II, 34, n. 2.

page 333 note 1 cf. B. B. Serjeant, op. cit., 445. A verb ’akinna (imperative of ’akanna, iv) was used by‘Umar b. al-(tab to indicate his command to have a watertight roof or ceiling built for the mosque in Madina: kāna saqfu al-masjidi min jarīdi al- wa-’amara ‘Umaru bi-binā’ial-masjidi wa-qāla: ’akinna al-nāsa min al-maṭar; , ṣaḥīḥ, Leiden, 1862, I, 123. Cf. also the following footnote.

page 333 note 2 R. B. Serjeant, op. cit., 444–6. The Ḥaḍramī mosque seems to have preserved the basic plan of a pre-Islamic South Arabian temple, with al-makān al-kanīn representing ESA mknt and miḥirāb or maḥārib representing ESA . Mosques outside Ḥaḍramawt did not, to my knowledge, have a front part within the covered part of the mosque on the qibla side, similar to the Ḥaḍrami kanīn. divided by a wall from the rest of the covered part opening on to the courtyard. This might have been one reason why in Arabic kunna, derived from knn, like Ḥaḍramī kanīn and ESA mknt, does not appear in the architecture of mosques and has become architecturely the equivalent of saqīfa, ẓulla, or ṣuffa, all of which denote a portico, or even the equivalent of raff‘‘ledge’; cf. Tāj. art. knn. These ‘ new ’ meanings of kunna show relation to miḥrāb, and kunna might have acquired them by ‘attraction’.

page 334 note 1 It is in this sense that miḥrāb in the story of ‘Urwa b. Mas‘ūd should be taken. (Cf. R. B.Serjeant, op. cit., 440, where the tradition is given after the text in Tāj; cf. also, Guillaume(tr.), A., The life of Muḥammad, O.U.P., 1955, 614Google Scholar, for the account of the incident.) The fact that his miḥrāb overlooked the people of al-Ṭā’if might have been only accidental, in the sense that the miḥrāb was built on a floor higher than the ground level. It is also in this sense that miḥrāb in Qur’ān in, 37, 39, and possibly xix, 13, should be taken.

page 335 note 1 The combination, as far as I know, was not used in Sassanian Persia (Arm. asparapet being generally considered as = sparapet).