TAGHUT. The term taghut, from the root tghy (“to rebel, transgress, or overstep the mark”), occurs eight times in the Qur’an, where it denotes a focus of worship other than God and so is often translated as “idols” or “Satan.” But its meaning is wider than this: surah 4.6o refers to taking cases for judgment
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TAFSIR. Exegesis of the Qur’an is known as tafsir. The focus in this article will be on Sunni tafsir, but Shi’i tafsir will also be discussed. The Qur’an, regarded as the word of God, needed tafsir-elucidation, explanation, interpretation, or commentary-for an obvious reason: it had to be understood clearly and fully so that its commandments
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TABLIGHI JAMA`AT. The Tablighi Jama’at of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, also variously called the Jama’at (Party), Tahrik (Movement), Nizam (System), Tanzim (Organization), and Tahrik-i Iman (Faith Movement), is one of the most important grassroots Islamic movements in the contemporary Muslim world. From a modest beginning in 1926 with da’wah (missionary) work in Mewat near Delhi under
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TABLIGH. Qazi Muhammad Sulaiman Mansurpuri (d. 1930), an Indian scholar known for several works defending Islam against criticism by non-Muslims, defined tabligh in Tabligh al-Islam (Simla, 1928, p. 4) as “a call toward one’s religion by one nation to another.” He argued that Islam was the only religion whose scriptures obliged its followers to proselytize
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TABATABA’I, MUHAMMAD HUSAYN ( 16 March 1903 – 15 November 1981), known to his contemporaries as `Allamah Tabataba’I, one of the foremost Qur’anic commentators and traditional Persian philosophers of the twentieth century. Born to a well-known family of Shi’i scholars of Tabriz in AH 1321/1903 CE, he carried out his early studies in the city of
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`ALI IBN ABI TALIB (c. 597-66o), the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, the fourth caliph of the Sunni Muslims, and the first imam of all the Shi’s. `Ali was ten or eleven years old when he embraced Islam and is considered to be the first Muslim after Khadijah, Muhammad’s wife. He grew up
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The absence of a body of written aesthetic theory in Islam before the nineteenth century may be attributed in part to the traditional Islamic disapproval of visual arts and music, but primarily to the lack in Islam of a parallel to the artist’s role as it emerged in Europe at the time of the Renaissance.
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One of the most important structural elements of Islamic society in Southeast Asia is adat (Ar., `adat), which denotes refined culture and more specifically local custom and indigenous law, established through practice and repeated precedent. In the Malay world adat should first of all be viewed as a cultural concept that can be understood only
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