purdah — curtain, the state of concealment required of women in some Islamic cultures.
qadi, kadi, qazi — magistrate.
Quran — ‘recitation’; the holy scripture of Islam containing the authentic words and revelations of God as dictated by the angel Gabril to the Prophet.
Qutbee — follower of the political philosophy of the Egyptian Islamist revolutionary Sayyid Qutb.
Ramadan — month of fasting, one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
Rashidun — ‘rightly guided ones’; title given to the first four Caliphs who followed the Prophet as religious and political leaders of the Islamic world, seen by reformers as exemplary rulers of Islam’s golden age.
rawaj — Pathan customary law, which traditionally took precedence over sharia.
rissaldar — see subedar.
sahib, saheb — ‘master’, Arabic title applied to man of rank, in British India came to be applied to Europeans.
salaam — ‘peace’, thus salaam alaikum – ‘peace be upon you’, the traditional Muslim greeting.
salaf — ‘forefathers’, from al-Salaf al-Salih – ‘the Righteous Forefathers’, the Prophets Companions and the scholars of the two generations who came after them; thus salafi – ‘following the forefathers’, and salafiyya – ‘followers of the forefathers’. The ideal of emulating the forefathers of early Islam was first proposed by Ibn Taymiyya. In modern Islam the term has wider connotations although is still associated with fundamentalists who seek to emulate the early Muslims and reject bidat and shirk.
salat — obligatory five daily prayers; one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
sangar — stone breastwork in mountain warfare.
sarai — traveller’s rest house, thus caravanserai; palace (in Arabia).
sawm — fasting during the month of Ramadan; one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
saiyyed, sayyed, syed — descendant of the Prophet; see also Sayyeds.
Sayyeds — a tribe of questionable origin occupying the Khagan valley in northern Hazara who claim descent from the Prophet.
sepoy — infantry soldier in Indian Army. shah king, title of respect accorded to saiyyeds.
shahadah — profession of faith in God and his Prophet. ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his Apostle’; one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
shaheed — martyr.
shaykh, sheikh — leader of Arabic stock, learned man.
sharia — ‘the path’; the divinely ordained laws of Islam governing all aspects of Muslim behaviour. By about AD 900 it became accepted among Sunnis that all issues had been resolved by the four schools of the understanding of sharia – Hanafi, Shafii, Maliki and Hanbali – leaving no further room for the exercise of ijtihad.
sharif, sherif — one who has direct descent from the Prophet; member of Arab tribal aristocracy; ruler of holy places.
Shia — ‘the party’; the largest minority sect of Muslims, which regards Imam Ali and his descendants as the legitimate descendants of the Prophet and thus leaders of the umma; itself divided into a number of lesser sects, and regarded as heretical by the Sunnis because it rejects the doctrine of ijma and turns instead to the authority of imams from the line of Ali.
shirk — the act of associating anything with God, a sin in the eyes of Wahhabis.
shura — religious council.
Sikh — ‘disciple’, thus follower of the Sikh religion originating from the teachings of Guru Nanak.
sowar — Indian cavalry trooper. station in British India, the area where British officials lived and worked.
subedar — most senior officer rank held by Indian in Indian Army infantry; the cavalry equivalent is rissaldar.
Sufi — form of Islamic mysticism seen by many Sunni reformers as heretical.
sunnah — ‘custom’; precedents provided by the practices of the Prophet and his immediate successors as laid down in the Hadith, regarded by strict Muslims as no less binding than the Quran; see Sunni.
Sunni — ‘of the sunnah’, the mainstream group of Islam, which accepts the authority of the sunnah and of the line of caliphs who came after the Prophet.
talib-ul-ulm — ‘seeker of knowledge’, thus religious student; plural taliban; thus Taliban, a fighting movement formed originally from religious students by Mullah Muhammad Omar of Kandahar in 1996 to bring sharia to Afghanistan.
talwar — curved fighting sword.
taqlid — following past interpretations of sharia as interpreted by the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
tariq — path, thus Tariqa-i-Muhammadia, ‘Path of Muhammad’, the name given by Syed Ahmad to his revivalist movement.
tawhid — the doctrine of God’s oneness, absolute monotheism or unitarianism, the central pillar of Wahhabism.
thana — police post.
tserai — land granted to a holy man or his followers in perpetuity.
ulema, ulama — those learned in the ways of Islam, thus the collective body of Islamic scholars and others recognised as part of the Islamic religious hierarchy, including judges, teachers and religious administrators; singular alim.
ulm, ulum — Islamic learning.
umma — world community of Islam.
wadi — dry water-course (Arabia).
Wahhabi — follower of the Arab reformer and revolutionary Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (c. 1700-92), who called for a return to the pure Islam of the Salafi and waged violent jihad against those he and his followers regarded as idolaters, polytheists and apostates; thus Wahhabism, the form of Islamic fundamentalism now dominant in Saudi Arabia; see Al-muwahhidun.
wali — friend of God, honorific title usually used by Sufis, thus Wali of Swat.
wazir — vizier, chief minister, counsellor; also name of member of Waziri Pathan tribe.
zai — son, thus Yusufzai – sons of Joseph, a major Pathan tribe.
zakat — tithe all Muslims pay as religious tax; one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
zamin — land; thus zamindar – landowner.
zan — women, thus zanana – women’s quarters.
zar — gold.
Bibliography
Key sources in English include the reports of various British political officers such as Francis Warden of the East India Company based at Bushire and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and the later compilations of a number of government officials in India including J. H. Reily, John Colvin, Dr H. W. Bellew, T. E. Ravenshaw, James O’Kinealy, Edward Rehatsek and Sir William Hunter. As might be expected, their writings show pronounced anti-Wahhabi and pro-British bias.