Al-Dhahabi


Shams ad-Dīn adh-Dhahabī, also known as Shams ad-Dīn abū ʿAbdillāh Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn ʿUthmān ibn Qāymāẓ ibn ʿAbdillāh at-Turkumānī al-Fāriqī ad-Dimashqī was a Syrian Islamic historian and Hadith expert.

Life

Adh-Dhahabi was born in Damascus on 5 October 1274. He was of Turkmen ancestry from Mayyafariqin, northeast of Diyar Bakr. At some point, they moved to Damascus. His name, ibn adh-Dhahabi, reveals his father's profession. He began his study of hadith at age eighteen, travelling from Damascus to Baalbek, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Nabulus, Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Hijaz, and elsewhere, before returning to Damascus to teach and write. He authored many works and achieved wide renown as a perspicuous critic and expert examiner of the hadith. He wrote an encyclopedic biographical history and was the foremost authority on the canonical readings of the Qur'an. Some of his teachers were women. At Baalbek Zaynab bint ʿUmar b. al-Kindī was among his most influential teachers.
Adh-Dhahabi lost his sight two years before he died, leaving three children: the eldest, his daughter, Amat al-`Aziz, and his two sons, `Abd Allah and Abu Hurayra `Abd al-Rahman. The latter son taught the hadith masters Ibn Nasir-ud-din al-Damishqi and Ibn Hajar, and through them transmitted several works authored or narrated by his father.

Teachers

Among adh-Dhahabi's most notable teachers in hadith, fiqh and aqida:
Adh-Dhahabi authored nearly a hundred works of history, biography and theology. His history of medicine begins with Ancient Greek and Indian practices and practitioners, such as Hippocrates, Galen, etc, through the Pre-Islamic Arabian era, to "prophetic medicine" as revealed by the Muslim prophet Muhammad to the medical knowledge contained in works of scholars such as Ibn Sina.. The following are the better known titles: