Southern-Central Semitic language spoken in a large area including North Africa, most of the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Middle East. (See Afro-Asiatic languages.)
Arabic is the language of the Qur'an (or Koran, the sacred book of Islam) and the religious language of all Muslims. Literary Arabic, usually called Classical Arabic, is essentially the form of the language…
history of the region from prehistoric times to the present.
Some time after the rise of Islam in the first quarter of the 7th century AD and the emergence of the Arabian Muslims as the founders of one of the great empires of history, the name “'Arab” came to be used by these Muslims themselves and by the nations with whom they came in contact to indicate all people of Arabian…
flourished 10th century BC
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, oil on canvas by …
Courtesy of the trustees of the National Gallery, London
Arabic Bilqis , Ethiopian Makeda according to Jewish and Islamic traditions, ruler of the Kingdom of Saba' (or Sheba) in southwestern Arabia. In the Old Testament account of the reign of King Solomon, she visited his court at the head of a camel caravan bearing gold, jewels, and spices. The story provides evidence for the existence of important commercial relations between ancient Israel and Arabia. According to the Bible, the purpose of her visit was to test Solomon's wisdom by asking him to solve a number of riddles.
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The story of Bilqis, as the Queen of Sheba is known in Islamic tradition, appears in the Qur'an, though she is not mentioned by name, and her story has been embellished by Muslim commentators; the Arabs have also given Bilqis a southern Arabian genealogy, and she is the subject of a widespread cycle of legends. According to one account, Solomon, having heard from a hoopoe, one of his birds, that Bilqis and her kingdom worshipped the Sun, sent a letter asking her to worship God. She replied by sending gifts, but, when Solomon proved unreceptive to them, she came to his court herself. The king's demons, meanwhile, fearing that he might be tempted into marrying Bilqis, whispered to him that she had hairy legs and the hooves of an ass. Solomon, being curious about such a peculiar phenomenon, had a glass floor built before his throne, so that Bilqis, tricked into thinking it was water, raised her skirts to cross it and revealed that her legs were truly hairy. Solomon then ordered his demons to create a depilatory for the queen. Tradition does not agree as to whether Solomon himself married Bilqis or gave her in marriage to a Hamdani tribesman; she did, however, become a believer.
The story of Sheba, which was probably derived from Jewish tradition, also appears among the Persians, where she is considered the daughter of a Chinese king and a peri. According to Ethiopian tradition, Sheba (called Makeda) bore Solomon a son, Menilek I, who founded the royal dynasty of Ethiopia
major world religion belonging to the Semitic family; it was promulgated by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the 7th century AD. The Arabic term islam, literally “surrender,” illuminates the fundamental religious idea of Islam—that the believer (called a Muslim, from the active particle of islam) accepts “surrender to the will of Allah (Arabic: God).” Allah is viewed as the sole God—creator, sustainer, and restorer of the world. The will of Allah, to which man must submit, is made known through the sacred scriptures, the Qur'an (Koran), which Allah revealed to his messenger, Muhammad. In Islam Muhammad is considered the last of a series of prophets (including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and others), and his message simultaneously consummates and completes the “revelations” attriin full Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim founder of the religion of Islam, accepted by Muslims throughout the world as the last of the prophets of God.
Although his name is now invoked in reverence several billion times every day, Muhammad was the most reviled figure in the history of the West from the 7th century until quite….
in Islam, the pulpit from which the sermon (khutbah) is delivered. In its simplest form the minbar is a platform with three steps; often it is constructed as a domed box at the top of a staircase and is reached through a doorway that can be closed.
Muhammad originally delivered his khutbahs while leaning against a palm-trunk pillar in the mosque at Medina. Hadith (accounts of Muhammad's life and sayings) report that Muhammad later used a seat with two steps for receiving delegations in the mosque and also that he preached from this portable minbar, which was fashioned from tamarisk wood by a Greek or Abyssinian carpenter. His successors, the caliphs, used his minbar as a symbol of their authority.
During the first century of Islam, provincial governors also came to use the minbar, from which they made speeches and heard petitions, primarily in their capacity as rulers. When the khutbah lost its informative, political, and discursive character and became a purely religious sermon during the reign of the 'Abbasid caliphs, the minbar also became a religious object. It became more permanent in nature, the number of steps increased, and it was commonly executed in stone or brick. It was even covered with a cloth, the qatifah.
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