Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Sa‘d ibn Manī‘ al-Baṣrī al-Hāshimī or simply Ibn Sa'd ( ar, ابن سعد) and nicknamed ''Scribe of Waqidi'' (''Katib al-Waqidi''), was a

scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...

and

Arabia The Arabian Peninsula, (; ar, شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or , , "Island of the Arabs") or Arabia, is a peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plate. ...

n biographer. Ibn Sa'd was born in 784/785 CE (168 AH) and died on 16 February 845 CE (230 AH). Ibn Sa'd was from

Basra Basra ( ar, ٱلْبَصْرَة, al-Baṣrah) is an Iraqi city located on the Shatt al-Arab. It had an estimated population of 1.4 million in 2018. Basra is also Iraq's main port, although it does not have deep water access, which is hand ...

, but lived mostly in

Baghdad Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...

, hence the ''nisba'' al-Basri and al-Baghdadi respectively. He is said to have died at the age of 62 in Baghdad and was buried in the cemetery of the Syrian gate.

''Kitāb aṭ-Tabaqāt al-Kabīr''

The ''Kitāb aṭ-Tabaqāt al-Kabīr'' in Arabic (), is a compendium of biographical information about famous

Islam Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic Monotheism#Islam, monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God in Islam, God (or ...

ic personalities. This eight-volume work contains the lives of

Muhammad Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 Common Era, CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Muhammad in Islam, Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet Divine inspiration, di ...

, his Companions and Helpers, including those who fought at the

Battle of Badr The Battle of Badr ( ar, غَزْوَةُ بَدِرْ ), also referred to as The Day of the Criterion (, ) in the Quran, Qur'an and by Muslims, was fought on 13 March 624 CE (17 Ramadan (calendar month), Ramadan, 2 Anno Hegirae, AH), near the ...

as a special class, and of the following generation, the Followers, who received their traditions from the Companions. Ibn Sa'd's authorship of this work is attested in a postscript to the book added by a later writer. In this notice he is described as a "client of al-Husayn ibn ‘Abdullah of the ‘Abbasid family".

* Books 1 and 2 contain a biography ( ''sirah'') of

. * Books 3 and 4 contain biographies of companions of Muhammad. * Books 5, 6 and 7 contain biographies of later Islamic scholars. * Book 8 contains biographies of Islamic women.

Published editions

Arabic

* This work was edited between 1904 and 1921 by

Eduard Sachau Carl Eduard Sachau (20 July 1845 – 17 September 1930) was a German orientalist. He taught Josef Horovitz and Eugen Mittwoch. Biography He studied oriental languages at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, obtaining his PhD at Halle in 1867. ...

(

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 wit ...

, 1904 sqq.), including brief German synopses with page references for each book; cf.

O. Loth O is the fifteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. O may also refer to: Letters * Օ օ, (Unicode: U+0555, U+0585) a letter in the Armenian alphabet * Ο ο, Omicron, (Greek), a letter in the Greek alphabet * O (Cyrillic), a letter of the ...

, ''Das Classenbuch des Ibn Sad'' (

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

, 1869). * In 1968, Iḥsān Abbās edited it (Beirut: Dār Sādir). * Contains 11 volumes.

English

* Volumes 1 and 2 (of the Sachau edition) were translated in 1967 and 1972, respectively, by S. Moninul Haq, Pakistan Historical Society. ''Ibn Sa'd's Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir Vols. 1&2''. * Abridged translations of Volumes 3, 6, 7 and 8 have been translated by Aisha Bewley and published under the titles of ''The Companions of Badr'', ''The Men of Madina'', ''The Scholars of Kufa'' and ''The Women of Madina''.

References

;Attribution

External links

Biodata at MuslimScholars.info
784 births 845 deaths Arab Muslim historians of Islam 9th-century historians from the Abbasid Caliphate Hadith scholars 9th-century Arabs Biographical evaluation scholars {{islam-book-stub