PILLARS OF ISLAM. The foundations (arkan) upon which the religion of Islam rests are known as the five pillars, a belief based in a saying of the Prophet, reported in both Sunni and Shi` Y hadith tradition, “Islam is built upon five [fundamentals].” The five are the profession or witness (shahadah). “There is no god
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PILGRIMAGE. See Hajj; Ziyarah. HAJJ. Unique among the world’s great pilgrimages, the hajj is in many ways also the most important.
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PHILOSOPHY. From its genesis twelve hundred years ago to today, Islamic philosophy (al-hikmah; alfalsafah) has been one of the major intellectual traditions within the Islamic world, and it has influenced and been influenced by many other intellectual perspectives including scholastic theology (kalam) and doctrinal Sufism (al-ma’rifah; `irfan). The life of Islamic philosophy did not terminate
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PHILIPPINES. In 1990. the Muslim population of the Philippines comprised between five and six million, or about 8.5 percent of the country’s sixty-six million inhabitants. The vast majority of these Moros, as Philippine Muslims are called, live in the western and central parts of Mindanao island and the Sulu Archipelago. They are classified into twelve
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PESANTREN. A type of school in Southeast Asia offering second-level training in Islamic subjects is termed pesantren on Java, surau on Sumatra, pondok on the Malay Peninsula, and pandita (“school”) in the Philippines. Pesantren derives from the sixteenth century, when learning centers known as the “place of learning for the Islamic faithful (santris),” were established.
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PERSIAN LITERATURE is a body of poetic and other literary works created principally, but not exclusively, in Iran. Beyond the present political boundaries of Iran proper, Afghanistan, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and Turkey have been home to a rich body of literary work written in Persian. In the context of Iran’s full and multifaceted
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PERKIM. An acronym for Pertubuhan Kebajikan Islam SeMalaysia, or All Malaysia Muslim Welfare Association, PERKIM was founded in 1960 by the first prime minister of the newly independent nation, Tunku Abdul Rahman, as a religious and social welfare organization. Much of the original funding was provided by the Tunku’s contacts with elites in the Muslim
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PERIODICAL LITERATURE. It is a prodigious, if not impossible, exercise to circumscribe “Islamic periodical literature.” The tradition of Orientalist scholarship long employed the term “Arabic literature” as a synonym for “Islamic literature,” extending this to a degree to literature in Turkish and Farsi. Urdu and Malay, however, did not receive the attention owed to the
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PEOPLE OF THE BOOK. Qur’anic in origin, the term ahl al-kitdb refers mainly to Jews, Christians, and (less frequently) the Sabaeans as possessors of previous revealed books. It was sometimes applied also to other communities. Zoroastrians were most prominent here, although even polytheists were sometimes thus categorized. In the case of the Jews and Christians,
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