Muhammad al-Amin ibn Fadlallah ibn Muhiballah ibn Muhibb al-Din al-Dimashqi, commonly known as al-Muhibbi was an
Ottoman historian based in
Damascus
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. He is best known for voluminous dictionary of biographies of 17th-century Muslim notables.
Biography
Muhibbi was born in
Damascus
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in 1651 to a scholarly family from the
Hanafi madhhab, the Islamic school of law favored by the
Ottoman state, which conquered the Levant in 1516. His great-grandfather Muhibb al-Din Muhammad was originally from
Hama
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and served as a
qadi (judge) in several northern Syrian towns,
Cairo and an instructor in Damascus.
Muhibbi moved to
Beirut when his father Fadlallah ibn Muhiballah was appointed the
qadi (head judge) of the city, a position he held until 1669. Muhibbi returned to live in Damascus on several occasions during this period. Sometime after his father died in 1671, he studied in
Bursa
( grc-gre, Προῦσα, Proûsa, Latin: Prusa, ota, بورسه, Arabic:بورصة) is a city in northwestern Turkey and the administrative center of Bursa Province. The fourth-most populous city in Turkey and second-most populous in the ...
for a short period, returning to Damascus in 1675.
He was patronized by the prominent qadi Muhammad ibn Lutfallah ibn Bayram al-Izzati, who had funded his studies in Bursa and later secured him an appointment as the qadi of
Edirne. When Izzati became ill and resigned, Muhibbi accompanied him to the Ottoman capital
Constantinople where he died in 1681.
Upon his return to Damascus shortly after his patron's death, Muhibbi began his writing career. After making the
Hajj
The Hajj (; ar, حَجّ '; sometimes also spelled Hadj, Hadji or Haj in English) is an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holiest city for Muslims. Hajj is a mandatory religious duty for Muslims that must be carried ...
pilgrimage to
Mecca in 1690 he was appointed a deputy qadi in Damascus and worked as an instructor in the Aminiyya Madrasa. He died in the city on 11 November 1699.
Works
Muhibbi is best known for writing a collection of biographies about the notables of his lifetime and the preceding generation. His finished work consisted of 1,283 entries and was completed in 1685. He also had a draft work of biographies about notables from the
Hejaz
The Hejaz (, also ; ar, ٱلْحِجَاز, al-Ḥijāz, lit=the Barrier, ) is a region in the west of Saudi Arabia. It includes the cities of Mecca, Medina, Jeddah, Tabuk, Yanbu, Taif, and Baljurashi. It is also known as the "Western Provin ...
and
Yemen. Muhibbi authored a second biographical work universal in scope. Among his sources were his Damascene near-contemporaries
Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi's and
al-Burini's biographical dictionaries. Muhibbi went further in scope, including many luminaries from the Hejaz, Yemen and
Bahrayn, as well as
India.
Having learned Turkish and Persian during his extensive time in Constantinople and Anatolia, he translated into Arabic numerous poems from the two languages. Muhibbi composed poetry himself was regarded by the 18th-century Damascene historian
Khalil al-Muradi as highly talented and popular among his listeners.
Notes
References
Bibliography
*
*{{EI2 , last=Brockelmann , first=C. , authorlink=Carl Brockelmann , volume=7 , pages=496–497
1651 births
1699 deaths
17th-century Arabic writers
17th-century biographers
17th-century people from the Ottoman Empire
People from Damascus