al-Khatib al-Baghdadi
1002 CE–1071 CE · Baghdad
Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Ali, known as al-Khatib al-Baghdadi ("the preacher of Baghdad"), was one of the foremost hadith scholars and historians of medieval Islam. According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam he was born on 24 Jumada II 392 AH / 10 May 1002 CE; the sources disagree on the exact village — some name Hanikiya near the Nahr al-Malik canal below Baghdad, others a hamlet on the Kufa-Mecca road, while his father served as preacher (khatib) at Darzijan, southwest of Baghdad. He studied first in Baghdad, then travelled widely in pursuit of hadith (reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), reaching Basra, Kufa, and on a later eastward journey Nishapur, Rayy and Isfahan in Khurasan and the Jibal, before returning to Baghdad; he afterward travelled through greater Syria and performed the pilgrimage at Mecca.
He is best known for two works. Tarikh Baghdad ("History of Baghdad") is a vast biographical dictionary preserving thousands of life-notices of the city's scholars and notables. Al-Kifaya became a cornerstone of the science of hadith criticism — the discipline of grading reports and their chains of transmission (isnad). In law he followed the Shafi'i school. The biographers disagree about his earlier affiliation: the Hanbali historian Ibn al-Jawzi reports that he began as a Hanbali before turning to the Shafi'i school, but many earlier and later authorities hold that he was a Shafi'i from the outset and never a Hanbali. In creed he is reported to have followed the Ash'ari school, a point his Hanbali contemporaries contested. He died in Baghdad on 7 Dhu'l-Hijja 463 AH / 5 September 1071 CE and was, it is related, buried by his own wish near the grave of the early ascetic Bishr al-Hafi.
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BaghdadIraq
What they did here
Born 24 Jumada II 392 AH / 10 May 1002 CE in the rural district below Baghdad. Sources differ on the exact village (Hanikiya near the Nahr al-Malik canal, or a hamlet on the Kufa-Mecca road); his father preached at Darzijan, southwest of the city. We pin Baghdad as the documented region of his birth and upbringing.
About Baghdad
Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Khatib al-Baghdadi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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