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ĀṢAFĪ HERAVĪ, Āṣaf b. Naʿīm-al-dīn Neʿmatallāh b. ʿAlā-al-dīn ʿAlī Qohestānī, a minor poet of the Timurid period (d. 923/1517). His father was the vizier of the Timurid sultan Abū Saʿīd (r. 855-73/1451-69), and his pen-name Āṣafī was evidently chosen because Āṣaf, the name of Solomon’s minister, was a conventional title…

ASAGARTA “Sagartia,” ASAGARTIYA “Sagartian” (Old Persian; Elamite Aš-šá-kar-ti-ia, Babylonian kurSa-ga-ar-ta-a-a, Greek Sagartíā, Sagártioi), an Iranian tribe of uncertain location. In the list of Achaemenid lands given in a Persepolis inscription of Darius I (DPe 15-16), the Sagartians precede the Parthians (Parθava), Zarangians (Zranka), Arians (Haraiva), Bactrians (Bāxtriš), etc.; they thus…

ASĀLEM, a mountainous district in Ṭāleš, now a dehestān of the central baḵš of the šahrestān of Ṭawāleš, province of Gīlān, Iran. Stretching about 11 km along the Caspian Sea, it comprises the whole basin of the Nāv-rūd and the upper valley of the Rūd-e Dīnāčāl (or Rūd-e Lomer), the…

AṢAMM, ABU BAKR ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān b. Kaysān (d. 200/815-6 or 201/816-7), Muʿtazilite of Baṣra. All of his writings are lost and, despite his prominence in his day, they have left less of a residue in later literature than those of other leading Muʿtazilites of the period. Ebn al-Nadim’s Fehrest (ed. Tajaddod,…

ASĀS (pl. osos), “foundation, basis,” a degree of the Ismaʿili daʿwa hierarchy. It designates the man who discloses the spiritual interpretation (taʾwīl) of the revelation (tanzīl ) and who knows the inner meaning (bāṭen) of the outer (ẓāher) religious law (šarīʿa) and imparts this to the initiates. According to Ismaʿili…

AŠAVAN (Avestan, also ašāvan-), lit. “possessing truth (aša).” This word is attested in Old Persian as artāvan-, and in Old Indian as ṛtāˊvan-. It is used as an adjective referring to humans, to Ahura Mazdā and the divine or angelic entities, or to anything that pertains to the world of…

ASĀWERA, Arabic broken plural form (the variant asāwīrāt also occurs in Yaʿqūbī, p. 202) of a singular oswār(ī), eswār(ī), early recognized by Arab philologists as a loanword from Persian meaning “cavalryman,” equivalent to Ar. fāres (cf. Jawālīqī, al-Moʿarrab, ed. Aḥmad Moḥammad Šāker, repr. Tehran, 1966, pp. 20-21). The Iranian background…

ASB, “horse” (equus cabullus, Av. aspa-, Old PerS. asa- and aspa-, Mid. and NPers. asp/b). i. In pre-Islamic Iran. ii. Among the Scythians. iii. In Islamic times. iv. In Afghanistan.

ASB i. In Pre-Islamic Iran From the dawn of history the Iranians have celebrated the horse in their art and in their literature. There were horses closely related to (and also the progenitors of) present-day domesticated horses living in temperate Eurasia in the Pleistocene (F. Haṇčar, Das Pferd in prähistorischer und…

ASB ii. Among the Scythians The Scythians (q.v.) are generally believed to have been among the earliest, if not the earliest, of the Eurasian peoples to learn to ride the horse. Owing to the uncertainty of life in the steppes, both the nomads and the farm laborers had to be…

ASB iii. In Islamic Times The great importance of horses, which had been a feature of ancient Iran, did not lessen under the successive post-Islamic regimes. Horses were valued not only for their many practical uses but also because Islam bids Moslems to breed and keep them; in the words…