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Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani
Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani
897 CE–967 CE · Aleppo
Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (c. 897–967 CE / c. 284–356 AH) was an Arab litterateur, genealogist, and musicologist active mainly in Baghdad. Although he was a descendant of the Marwanid branch of the Umayyad dynasty (his ancestry is often traced to the last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II), he is reported by both Sunni and Shia biographers to have held Shia sympathies, and later Shia scholars such as al-Tusi and al-Hilli classed him as a Zaydi. He is best known for the Kitab al-Aghani ("Book of Songs"), an encyclopedic, multi-volume compilation of Arabic poetry, song, and the lives of poets and musicians from the pre-Islamic era to his own day, which he is reported to have dedicated to the Hamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla of Aleppo. He also wrote Maqatil al-Talibiyyin, an account of descendants of Abu Talib who met violent deaths, in which he shows marked reverence for ʿAli and his family; the Kitab al-Aghani remains a primary source for the literary and cultural history of the early Islamic centuries.
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Aleppoארם צובהSyria
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About Aleppo
Aleppo (Halab), in northwestern Syria, is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with settlement possibly reaching back to the sixth millennium BCE. From 944 it was the seat of the Hamdanid emirate of Sayf al-Dawla, whose court drew the poet al-Mutanabbi and the philosopher al-Farabi. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks it gained new madrasas and remained a centre of Islamic scholarship and trade, and in 1516 it passed to the Ottomans, under whom it was one of the empire's chief commercial cities. Its long-established Jewish community kept the Aleppo Codex, a tenth-century Hebrew Bible manuscript, for some six centuries, until the synagogue holding it was burned in the 1947 riots; the surviving portion is now in Jerusalem.
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