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Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani
Abd al-Razzaq al-San'ani
744 CE–827 CE · Damascus
Abd al-Razzaq ibn Hammam al-San'ani (c. 126–211 AH / c. 744–827 CE) was an early Sunni hadith scholar and jurist from Sanaa in Yemen, regarded by his contemporaries as the foremost traditionist of his region. He is best known for the Musannaf, one of the earliest surviving topically arranged hadith compilations (preserving roughly 22,000 reports), and for a Tafsir transmitting early Quranic exegesis. He studied for years under Ma'mar ibn Rashid and also transmitted from Ibn Jurayj, Sufyan al-Thawri, al-Awza'i, and Malik ibn Anas, and counted leading figures such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Yahya ibn Ma'in among his students. Some later Sunni critics questioned a portion of his transmissions and noted reports of Shia sympathies (an attribution his student Ahmad ibn Hanbal said he had not personally heard from him), while still relying broadly on his material.
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DamascusדמשקSyria
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About Damascus
Damascus, the capital of Syria, is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was the seat of the Aramean kingdom of Aram-Damascus and later a Roman city. According to the Book of Acts, Ananias received the newly converted Saul (Paul) there, and the city remains the seat of several Eastern churches. Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate from 661 to 750, and under the Seljuks, Ayyubids and Mamluks its many madrasas made it a leading centre of Islamic learning; it was under Ottoman rule from 1516. Jews lived there from at least Roman times, and the kabbalist Hayyim Vital settled in the city in 1594.
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