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 Hadith is the Arabic word for a 'report' or an 'account f an event and refers to the Islamic oral tradition of anecdotes containing the purported words, actions, and the silent approvals of the Islamic prophet Muhammad or his immediate circle ...

, or the recorded prophecies and traditions of the Muslim prophet

Muhammad Muhammad (8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious and political leader and the founder of Islam. Muhammad in Islam, According to Islam, he was a prophet who was divinely inspired to preach and confirm the tawhid, monotheistic teachings of A ...

. 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 ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Spain, Spanish autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the Guadalquivir, River Guadalquivir, ...

Ignác Goldziher Ignác (Yitzhaq Yehuda) Goldziher (22 June 1850 – 13 November 1921), often credited as Ignaz Goldziher, was a Hungary, Hungarian scholar of Islam. Alongside Joseph Schacht and G.H.A. Juynboll, he is considered one of the pioneers of modern aca ...

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

Leiden Leiden ( ; ; in English language, English and Archaism, archaic Dutch language, Dutch also Leyden) is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Nethe ...

Brill Publishers Brill Academic Publishers () is a Dutch international academic publisher of books, academic journals, and Bibliographic database, databases founded in 1683, making it one of the oldest publishing houses in the Netherlands. Founded in the South ...

, 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 University from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 196 ...

Ibn Sayyid al-Nās

Encyclopaedia of Islam The ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'' (''EI'') is a reference work that facilitates the Islamic studies, academic study of Islam. It is published by Brill Publishers, Brill and provides information on various aspects of Islam and the Muslim world, Isl ...

, 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 Tunis (, ') is the capital city, capital and largest city of Tunisia. The greater metropolitan area of Tunis, often referred to as "Grand Tunis", has about 2,700,000 inhabitants. , it is the third-largest city in the Maghreb region (after Casabl ...

, 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. He was known as an adherent of the

Zahiri The Zahiri school or Zahirism is a school of Islamic jurisprudence within Sunni Islam. It was named after Dawud al-Zahiri and flourished in Spain during the Caliphate of Córdoba under the leadership of Ibn Hazm. It was also followed by the majo ...

school of

Sunni Islam Sunni Islam is the largest Islamic schools and branches, branch of Islam and the largest religious denomination in the world. It holds that Muhammad did not appoint any Succession to Muhammad, successor and that his closest companion Abu Bakr ...

Work

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

isnad In the Islamic study of hadith, an isnād (chain of transmitters, or literally "supporting"; ) refers to a list of people who passed on a tradition, from the original authority to whom the tradition is attributed to, to the present person reciting ...

s, or chains of narration establishing the historicity of claims, are unique;

Ibn Hisham Abu Muhammad Abd al-Malik ibn Hisham ibn Ayyub al-Himyari (; died 7 May 833), known simply as Ibn Hisham, was a 9th-century Abbasid historian and scholar. He grew up in Basra, in modern-day Iraq and later moved to Egypt. Life Ibn Hisham has ...

, 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 Abū Ḥayyān Athīr ad-Dīn al-Gharnāṭī (, November 1256 – July 1344 CE / 654 - 745 AH), whose full name is Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf bin ‘Alī ibn Yūsuf ibn Hayyān (), better known as Abū Ḥayyān al-Gharnati (, was an Andalusian Sunni ...

were often the presiding "judges" during poetic contests during the reign of

Mamluk Mamluk or Mamaluk (; (singular), , ''mamālīk'' (plural); translated as "one who is owned", meaning "slave") were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-so ...

sultan

Al-Nasir Muhammad Al-Malik an-Nasir Nasir ad-Din Muhammad ibn Qalawun (), commonly known as an-Nasir Muhammad (), or by his kunya: Abu al-Ma'ali () or as Ibn Qalawun (1285–1341) was the ninth Mamluk sultan of the Bahri dynasty who ruled Egypt between 129 ...

Slimane of Morocco ''Mawlay'' Sulayman bin Mohammed, 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 after the death of his half-brother ...

, the sultan of

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

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 the Latin ("review, analysis"). In textual criticism (as is the ...

Sahih al-Bukhari () is the first hadith collection of the Six Books of Sunni Islam. Compiled by Islamic scholar al-Bukhari () in the format, the work is valued by Sunni Muslims, alongside , as the most authentic after the Qur'an. Al-Bukhari organized the bo ...

, 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 Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm al-Juʿfī al-Bukhārī (; 21 July 810 – 1 September 870) was a 9th-century Persian Muslim '' muhaddith'' who is widely regarded as the most important ''hadith'' scholar in the histor ...

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 Harald Motzki (1948–2019) was a German-trained Islamic scholar who wrote on the transmission of hadith. He received his doctorate in Islamic Studies in 1978 from the University of Bonn. He was a professor of Islamic Studies at Nijmegen University ...

. 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 of Islam 1272 births 1334 deaths Egyptian historians of Islam 13th-century Arab people 14th-century Arab people