ROSARY. Arabic subḥah (سبحة). The rosary amongst Muḥammadans consists of 100 beads, and is used by them for counting the ninety-nine attributes of God, together with the essential name Allāh [[GOD]]; or the repetition of the Tasbīḥ (“O Holy God!”), the Taḥmīd (“Praised be God!”), and the Takbīr (“God is Great!”), or for the recital of any act of devotion. It is called in Persian and in Hindūstānī the Tasbīḥ (تسبيح).
The introduction of the rosary into Christendom in ascribed by Pope Pius V., in a Bull, A.D. 1596, to Dominic, the founder of the Black Friars (A.D. 1221), and it is related that Paul of Pherma, an Egyptian ascetic of the fourth century, being ordered to recite 300 prayers, collected as many pebbles which he kept in his bosom, and threw out one by one at every prayer, which shows that the rosary was probably not in use at that period.
ʿAbdu ʾl-Ḥaqq, the commentator on the Mishkātu ʾl-Maṣābiḥ, says that in the early days of Islām the Muḥammadans counted God’s praises on small pebbles, or on the fingers, from which the Wahhābīs maintain that their Prophet did not use a rosary. It seems probable that the Muslims borrowed the rosary from the Buddhists, and that the Crusaders copied their Muslim opponents and introduced it into Christendom.
ROZAH (روزه). The Persian word for the Arabic ṣaum, or fasting. [[FASTING], [RAMAZAN].]
RUBʿ (ربع). A fourth. A legal term used in Muḥammadan law, e.g. “a fourth,” or the wife’s portion when her husband dies without issue.
RUḤ (روح), pl. arwāḥ; Heb. רוּחַ ruakh, “spirit; soul; life.” Ibnu ʾl-As̤īr, author of the Nihāyah, says it is the nervous fluid or animal spirit. A vaporous substance, which is the principle of vitality and of sensation, and of voluntary motion.
In the Kitābu ʾt-Taʿrifāt, it is defined as a subtle body, the source of which is the hollow of the corporeal heart, and which diffuses itself into all the other parts of the body by means of the pulsing veins and arteries. See also [Gen. ix. 4]: “Flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof.” Many of the ancients believed the soul to reside in the blood. (See Virgil’s Æn., ix. p. 349.) The breath which a man breathes and which pervades the whole body. Called in Persian jān (جان). The philosophers say it is the blood, by the exhausting of which life ceases. The word is generally rendered in Hindūstānī as of the feminine gender, but Arabic authors render it as often masculine as feminine. (See Lane’s Arabic Dictionary, in loco.)
In the Qurʾān the word is sometimes used for Jesus, who is known as Rūḥu ʾllāh (“the Spirit of God”), for the angel Gabriel, and also for life, grace, soul, and the Spirit of Prophecy. (A complete list of texts is given in the article [SPIRIT].)
According to the Kitābu ʾt-Taʿrīfāt, p. 76, spirit is of three kinds:—