This Biographical Companion will be an indispensable reference tool for the serious student and scholar of Islamic Studies. It enables the user to quickly gain knowledge on the life, work, and professional background of almost every major and minor author, and thus to place each author in his/her proper perspective.

Scattered across the globe, the Isma'ilis constitute the second largest Shi'i community in the Muslim World. This study traces their history and doctrinal developments from their origins to the present day over a period of twelve centuries.

Heinz Halm's work presents a thorough discussion of the history, theology, and current state of this branch of Islam. Newly revised, Shi'ism includes updated information on the fate of the Shi'ite revolution in Iran as well as a new chapter on Iraq. Halm explores how Shi'ism differs from the rest of Islam, discussing the prominence of its authorities, the Imams, as well as its legal system, practices of worship, places of pilgrimages, and a religious ethos characterized by a fervor to suffer for the cause.

The feeling that Islamic literature deserves and requires an Islamic classification dcheme has been met with a widespread dissatisfaction among information scientists in the Muslim world. However, indexing the classical Qur'anic exegeses and Hadith collections still requires an initial operation list of both subject headings of both Qur'anic and Hadith texts. The book is based on an investigation of the terminology in the Qur'anic text for the purpose of designing a retrieval system. It makes use of conceptual verses and words as partial examples for the required task. These examples are used to test the factors affecting the design at both the documentary and computation levels. At the documentary level, the examples are used to examine the effects of Qur'anic terminology on the commentators and to see how it affects the performance of the retrieval system. It also examines the characteristics of the Qur'anic vocabulary, against the problems known to be encountered in constructing an efficient retrieval system. On the computation level, the examples are used to examine the possibility of the Qur'an in its stylistic form being processed by the computer. as a result, the study offers guidelines and recommendations with two examples for the natural and social sciences as a model for constructing a retrieval system for Qur'anic text.