The light of the day · Monday 7 September
Everyday English carries Arabic inside it
Sugar, cotton, sofa, tariff, magazine, zenith, nadir, alchemy, alkali, algebra: dozens of ordinary English words travelled through Arabic scholarship and trade into Europe's languages. The words came with the things and the ideas they named.
A shared inheritance
Monday 7 September 2026 · 24 Rabi al-Awwal 1448 AH
The word · History
أَبُو حَنِيفَة النُّعْمَان
Imam Abu Hanifah
The earliest of the four imams, a Kufan merchant whose school is the most widely followed today.
He was born around the year 80 and died in 150, in Baghdad. He is often counted among the Tabi'un on the basis that he may have seen the Companion Anas ibn Malik as a child, though scholars discuss this. He taught by argument in a circle rather than by dictation, and his students Abu Yusuf and Muhammad ash-Shaybani wrote the school down. He refused the post of chief judge and died in prison, and he is remembered as…
The Path · chapter 54 of 71
المهدي
Al-Mahdi: The Rightly Guided
From the household of the Prophet ﷺ: a ruler who fills the earth with justice as it was filled with wrong.
Justice returns before the world ends, despair of history is not a Muslim doctrine
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