Wafayat Acyan
Mosul · 1282
I
Ibn Khallikan
Ibn Khallikan
1211 CE–1282 CE · Aleppo
Ibn Khallikan (Abu'l-Abbas Shams al-Din Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Khallikan) was a Muslim judge and biographer of the Mamluk period. He is best known for a single great book, the Wafayat al-a'yan wa-anba' abna' al-zaman ("Deaths of Eminent Men and History of the Sons of the Epoch"), a biographical dictionary of several hundred notable figures arranged alphabetically and prized by historians for its careful detail and its quotations from works now lost.
He was born in 1211 (608 AH) in Irbil (Erbil), in the Jazira region of what is today northern Iraq. His family is reported to have claimed descent from the Barmakids, the famous administrative dynasty of Abbasid Baghdad; this is a traditional claim rather than an established fact. He studied first in Irbil, then in Aleppo and Damascus, and took up jurisprudence (fiqh) — the science of Islamic law — in Mosul and then in Egypt. He followed the Shafi'i school of law, one of the four main Sunni legal traditions.
Settling in Cairo, he served as a deputy to the chief judge and began assembling his biographical dictionary there. In 1261 he was appointed chief judge (qadi al-qudat) of Damascus. He was dismissed in 1271 and returned to teaching in Egypt, then was reinstated to the Damascus judgeship in 1278. He died in Damascus in 1282 (681 AH). His dictionary remains one of the foundational reference works of medieval Arabic scholarship.
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Stop 1 of 7Studying
Aleppoארם צובהSyria
What they did here
His formative studies took him from Irbil to Aleppo, a major center of Syrian learning under Ayyubid rule, as part of the standard scholarly itinerary reported in the sources (Britannica; Muslim Heritage). Exact dates are not preserved.
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.
Across the traditions, in Aleppo at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Ibn Khallikan’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn Khallikan’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.