Transliteration and Dates
For the transliteration of Arabic words and names the system of the third edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam is used, with a few minor differences: the Arabic pausal feminine ending is the prosodically more correct -ah instead of -a; compound personal names with Allāh are not written as one word (ʿAbdallāh, ʿUbaydallāh) but as two (ʿAbd Allāh, ʿUbayd Allāh), as in Arabic orthography, just as all other compound names beginning with ʿAbd. An apostrophe is used to distinguish a combination of two consonants (e.g., d’h as in adʾhān, “oils”) from a digraph (dh as in adhān “call to prayer”). Only in the index, to save space, is ibn, “son (of)” shortened to “b.” when it occurs between two names. Scholarly transliteration is not used for place names and Arabic words that have common English equivalents (Baghdad, Mosul, Qurʾan, imam, dinar). Dates are given according to the Muslim (Hijrī) and Christian (Mīlādī, Common Era) calendars, separated by a slash.