Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri
c. 1181 CE–c. 1245 CE · Mosul
Abu Amr Uthman ibn Abd al-Rahman, known as Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri, was a Sunni scholar of the Shafi'i school of law (madhhab) remembered above all as a master of the hadith sciences — the discipline that studies the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds and grades their reliability. He was born around 577 AH (1181 CE) in or near Shahrazur, a Kurdish district in what is now northern Iraq, and first studied jurisprudence (fiqh) with his father. He then pursued learning across the great centres of the age, including Mosul and, further east, the scholarly hub of Nishapur in Khurasan, before teaching in the Levant.
His lasting fame rests on the Muqaddima (also called Ulum al-Hadith or Ma'rifat anwa' ilm al-hadith), an "introduction to the science of hadith." Composed while he led a specialist hadith college in Damascus, it organised the terminology and methods of the field so authoritatively that later scholars referred to the genre simply as "the book of Ibn al-Salah" and wrote commentaries and versifications of it for centuries.
In matters of law he was a Shafi'i; biographers also describe him as following the Ash'ari school in theology, and report that he opposed the study of philosophy (falsafa) — a stance later writers cite both approvingly and critically. He died in Damascus in 643 AH (1245 CE) and was buried there.
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MosulמוסולNorthern Iraq — Kurdish Jewish region
What they did here
Studied at Mosul, a major centre of higher learning in the Jazira, before traveling east. Biographers consistently place an early phase of his education here.
About Mosul
Mosul is a city on the Tigris in northern Iraq; the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, lie on its eastern side. Arab Muslim forces took it in the 630s or early 640s. It later flourished under the Hamdanids and, from 1127, as the seat of the Zengid dynasty, and it was a centre of Islamic scholarship where the historian Ibn al-Athir lived and worked. The Mongols sacked it in 1262, and the Ottomans later ruled it for centuries. Its mixed population included Assyrian Christians and an old Jewish community, and in the seventeenth century Asenath Barzani led a yeshiva there. Nearly all Iraqi Jews left for Israel in 1950-52. The Islamic State held it in 2014-2017.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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