This volume adopts the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, with footnotes format and the flexible use of Ibid., op. cit., and cf. It adopts the simplified Arabic transliteration system of the Third Edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam:
Consonants
Short Vowels
Long Vowels
Diphthongs
al- (article)
Dates are provided following the “common” calendar (AD / Anno Domini), and only in a few cases is the Islamic calendar (AH / Anno Hegirae) also provided for indication of the arrival of Islam and some early founding dates.
While classical proper names are transliterated (e.g. al-Ghazālī), modern names, since the 1800s, are left without transliteration, and their official or common spellings are adopted, instead of an enforced transliteration (e.g. Ahmad Amin is written instead of Aḥmad Amīn, al-Jabri instead of al-Jābirī, Laroui instead of al-ʿArwī, Toufiq instead of Tawfīq, Himmich instead of Ḥimmīsh, Elmandjra instead of al-Minjara, Chafiq instead of Shafīq, and al-Raissouni instead of al-Raysūnī). Some other prominent names such as Abdelkébir Khatibi, Fatéma Mernissi, and Abdellatif Laâbi will have their first or family names appear in different formats, depending on the way they appear in titles of books and citations: Fatéma/Fatema/Fatima, Abdelkébir/Abdelkebir, Laâbi/Laabi. The same applies to other names whose spelling differs in the Francophone and Anglophone writing traditions, like Ibn Khaldoun / Ibn Khaldun, Hassan/Hasan, Idriss/Idris, Abdallah/Abdellah/Abdullah, Abdalkarim/Abdelkerim/Abdulkarim, Boudchiche/Butshish, and Mohammed/Mohamed/Muhammad. This also explains why the “ch” in proper nouns in English is often rendered as “sh,” but at times it is not, if the name of the scholar is already known through his/her official French spelling “ch” (e.g. the family name of the writer “Himmich” is kept as it is generally known, instead of transliterating it as “Himmish”). Enforcing consistency in such cases is not a wise choice as it could alter original citations and book titles. Nevertheless, the fact that book titles are transliterated consistently makes finding the author, however his/her name is spelt, a very easy task.
The preposition “wa” and definite article “al-” are often used as “wa al,” but the liaison/idghām “wa-l-” is also found in citations or cited works (e.g. al-turāth/at-turāth; wa al / wa-l-). Despite harmonization efforts, the following common words are found in multiple forms, because of the various citations and references used by the contributors who come from different scholarly and linguistic traditions: Quran/Qur’an/Qur’ān, sharīʿa/shariʿa/sharia. The geographic key term of the “Maghrib” (with “i”) is adopted, although “Maghreb” is also found because it is common in the literature and references. Names of common dynasties are left untransliterated (e.g., Idrissids, Almoravids, Almohads, Alawites), while the less common ones are transliterated (e.g., Banū l-Aḥmar, the Ḥafṣids). Names of common geographies are also left untransliterated. Harmony in the transliteration has been pursued throughout the volume, but freedom was left to individual authors in certain cases to adopt upper or lower case in the transliteration in their individual chapters. For example, the initials of Arabic titles are capitalized, and the articles and prepositions are left in lower case, as in English, although in Arabic script this differentiation does not exist; still, some authors in some chapters opted to leave all the titles in lower case, since Arabic does not recognise upper or lower case style; thus, the reader may find the same title in both forms in different chapters, although one style is adopted throughout in each single chapter (e.g., Binyat al-ʿaql al-ʿarabī / Binyat al-ʿAql al-ʿArabī).
For the translation of Arabic titles into English, it was left to individual authors to translate them as they saw fit, and only in rare cases did I propose a more suitable title. That is why the chapters may sometimes refer to the same book in Arabic but with slight differences in the translations provided in parentheses. For ease of reading, when a title is repeated, it is often its English equivalent that is repeated and not the original Arabic, although it was left to contributors to decide on this, depending on the importance of the title or on the weight the Arabic version has over the English one. As for the titles in French, it should be noted here that the norm is that only the first letter of the title is capitalized, and the rest remains in lower case; if the title starts with an article, the capital letter goes to the first next word (e.g. Du Clos à l’ouvert [From the Open to the Closed], although some scholars now tend to capitalize all words in a French title, with the exception of articles and prepositions, as in English; this reference style is found, although minimally, in this volume.
For the original dates of publication of books, this volume has tried to be as precise as possible and has ensured that the titles refer first to the original dates of publication, before providing the dates of the edition used. However, this may not have been followed meticulously throughout the volume because most of the Arabic publishing houses republish materials in new editions as if they were being published for the first time, without referring to the first year of publication or publishing house, and without mention of the original titles if they were originally written in a different language. For space limitations, in the bibliography lists of each chapter, we have kept only the original titles without their English translations which were provided either within the text or in the footnotes.