I
Ibn Abi Shayba
Ibn Abi Shayba
775 CE–849 CE · Baghdad
Abu Bakr ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Shayba al-ʿAbsi al-Kufi (159–235 AH / 775–849 CE) was a Sunni jurist and hadith master of Kufa, regarded by many specialists as among the four foremost hadith authorities of his generation, alongside Ahmad ibn Hanbal, ʿAli ibn al-Madini, and Yahya ibn Maʿin. He is best known for his al-Musannaf, one of the earliest surviving topically arranged hadith compilations, gathering some 37,000 reports organized by legal and doctrinal subject; he also compiled a Musnad and a work on adab (manners). Active during the early Abbasid period, he was a protégé of the caliph al-Mutawakkil and was encouraged to teach traditionalist (anti-Muʿtazilite) hadith in the mosques of Baghdad. His narrations are drawn upon across the major Sunni hadith collections.
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BaghdadIraq
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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.
Across the traditions, in Baghdad at the same time
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn Abi Shayba’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.