Muhammad bin Muhammad al-Ya'mari, better known as Fatḥ al-Dīn Ibn Sayyid al-Nās, was a Medieval Egyptian theologian who specialized in the field of

Hadith Ḥadīth ( or ; ar, حديث, , , , , , , literally "talk" or "discourse") or Athar ( ar, أثر, , literally "remnant"/"effect") refers to what the majority of Muslims believe to be a record of the words, actions, and the silent approva ...

, or the recorded prophecies and traditions of the Muslim prophet

Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the mo ...

. He was well known for his biography of Muhammad.

Life

Although Ibn Sayyid al-Nas was himself an Egyptian, he was descended from a Muslim Andalusian family from

Seville Seville (; es, Sevilla, ) is the capital and largest city of the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir, in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula ...

Ignác Goldziher Ignác (Yitzhaq Yehuda) Goldziher (22 June 1850 – 13 November 1921), often credited as Ignaz Goldziher, was a Hungarian scholar of Islam. Along with the German Theodor Nöldeke and the Dutch Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, he is considered the ...

, ''The Zahiris: Their Doctrine and Their History'', pg. 171.

Leiden Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wi ...

: Brill Publishers, 1997. The family fled due to hostility from Christians, who eventually took the city in 1248.

Franz Rosenthal Franz Rosenthal (August 31, 1914 – April 8, 2003) was the Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic languages at Yale from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985 ...

Ibn Sayyid al-Nās
Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill Online. Accessed 30 October 2013. His grandfather Abu Bakr Muhammad bin Ahmad was born in 1200 and settled in

Tunis ''Tounsi'' french: Tunisois , population_note = , population_urban = , population_metro = 2658816 , population_density_km2 = , timezone1 = CET , utc_offset1 ...

, where Ibn Sayyid al-Nas' father was born in October 1247. His grandfather died in 1261. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas died in the year 1334, corresponding to 734 in the

Hijri calendar The Hijri calendar ( ar, ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, translit=al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or ...

. He was known as an adherent of the

Zahiri The Ẓāhirī ( ar, ظاهري, otherwise transliterated as ''Dhāhirī'') ''madhhab'' or al-Ẓāhirīyyah ( ar, الظاهرية) is a Sunnī school of Islamic jurisprudence founded by Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī in the 9th century CE. It is chara ...

school of Sunni Islam.

Work

Ibn Sayyid al-Nas' biography of the prophet Muhammad is well known. Some of the

isnad Hadith studies ( ar, علم الحديث ''ʻilm al-ḥadīth'' "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism) consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in th ...

s, or chains of narration establishing the historicity of claims, are unique; Ibn Hisham, arguably the most respected classical biographer, included events in his version of the prophetic biography whose chains of narration are only available in Ibn Sayyid al-Nas' work. During his time, he was also considered one of Cairo's greatest composers of poetry in praise of Muhammad. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas along with Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati were often the presiding "judges" during poetic contests during the reign of

Mamluk Mamluk ( ar, مملوك, mamlūk (singular), , ''mamālīk'' (plural), translated as "one who is owned", meaning " slave", also transliterated as ''Mameluke'', ''mamluq'', ''mamluke'', ''mameluk'', ''mameluke'', ''mamaluke'', or ''marmeluke'') ...

sultan

Al-Nasir Muhammad Al-Malik an-Nasir Nasir ad-Din Muhammad ibn Qalawun ( ar, الملك الناصر ناصر الدين محمد بن قلاوون), commonly known as an-Nasir Muhammad ( ar, الناصر محمد), or by his kunya: Abu al-Ma'ali () or as Ibn Qal ...

Slimane of Morocco ''Mawlay'' Sulayman bin Mohammed ( ar, سليمان بن محمد), born on 28 June 1766 in Tafilalt and died on 28 November 1822 in Marrakesh, was a Sultan of Morocco from 1792 to 1822, as a ruler of the 'Alawi dynasty. He was proclaimed sultan a ...

, the sultan of

Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...

in the early 1800s who greatly restricted the acceptable reading material in his sultanate, designated Ibn Sayyid al-Nas' prophetic biography as one of only two approved works. Ibn Sayyid al-Nas was respected among ''hadith'' circles for his transmissions of a

recension Recension is the practice of editing or revising a text based on critical analysis. When referring to manuscripts, this may be a revision by another author. The term is derived from Latin ''recensio'' ("review, analysis"). In textual criticism (as ...

of Sahih al-Bukhari, the most significant collection of prophetic tradition in Sunni Islam. In regard to the widely reported raid of Hudhayl, Ibn Sayyid al-Nas' transmission is nearly identical to the narrations of

Muhammad al-Bukhari Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monoth ...

himself, save seven small differences, six copyist errors and one difference in a single word.Nicolet Boekhoff- van der Voort, "The Raid of Hudhayl: Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri's Version of the Event." Taken from ''Analysing Muslim Traditions: Studies in Legal, Exegetical and Maghāzī Ḥadīṯ'', pg. 325. Ed. Harald Motzki. Volume 78 of Islamic History and Civilization. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2010.

Citations

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fath al-Din Ibn Sayyid al-Nas Egyptian biographers 14th-century Muslim scholars of Islam Hadith scholars Sunni Muslim scholars 1272 births 1334 deaths Egyptian Muslim historians of Islam 13th-century Arabs 14th-century Arabs