The life and work of the popular public figure Nawwāb Bahādur ʿAbd al-Laṭīf (1828–93) in British-ruled Bengal spanned various domains of profession, education, politics, and religion. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was born in Faridpur into a family who claimed Arab origin and had settled in eastern Bengal in the eleventh/seventeenth century as landholders during Mughal rule. His father, a pleader in the Central Civil Court in Calcutta, ensured that his son received a mixed liberal English and Islamic education in the Dacca…

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf of Bhit’ (1102–66/1690–1752), whose popular title “Shāh Laṭīf” denotes his sayyid status, was the greatest of all Sindhī Ṣūfī poets. He was the great-great-grandson of the poet Shāh ʿAbd al-Karīm (d. 1032/1623) and belonged to the same important sayyid lineage of Mat’iārī, twenty-five kilometres north of Hyderabad, in Lower Sindh. Little is known of Shāh Laṭīf’s life, apart from the scanty details recorded in the early Persian writings of the memorialist Mīr ʿAlī Sher Qāniʿ of Ťhat’t’a, the author of the Maqālāt al-shuʿarā (“Discourses of the poets,” 1174/1760, pp…

Muwaffaq al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf b. Yūsuf al-Baghdādī (557–629/1162–1231) was an Arabic polymath, with a specific interest in grammar, medicine, and philosophy. He was born in his grandfather’s house on a street in Baghdad called Darb al-fālūdhaj (“Sweetmeats Alley”; Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, 2:202) in Rabīʿ I 557/March 1162. However, the Baghdad into which ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was born and raised was no longer the intellectual, political, and scientific centre of the Islamic world that it had been during its heyday in the third/ninth century. Whe…

ʿAbd al-Karīm of Bulŕī (d. 1032/1623), popularly known as Shāh Karīm—denoting his Sayyid status—was one of the earliest Sindhī Ṣūfī poets. He was born in 944/1538, into the important Sayyid lineage (that is, descended from the prophet Muḥammad) of Maťiārī, twenty-five kilometres north of Hyderabad. His enduring reputation in Sindh is due largely to his being both direct ancestor and poetic forerunner of his great-great-grandson, Shāh ʿAbd al-Laṭīf (d. 1165/1752), who is revered as the greatest of all Sindhī Ṣūfī poets. The verses (abyāt) of Shāh Karīm are especially interestin…

Abū Zayd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad al-Ṣughayyir al-Akhḍarī (919–53/1513–46 or 919–83/1513–75) was a North African scholar who wrote a number of didactic poems in a range of scholarly disciplines, some of which became extremely popular in later centuries. There is surprisingly little information about his life in pre-modern sources, and even a basic biography must rely on his writings, extant manuscripts, and much later sources whose reliability is not always clear. One of his didactic poems states tha…

ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kamāl al-Dīn Samarqandī (816–87/1413–82), author of the Persian-language history Maṭlaʿ-i saʿdayn va majmaʿ-i baḥrayn (Ar. Maṭlaʿ al-saʿdayn wa-majmaʿ al-baḥrayn), was born on 12 Shaʿbān 816/7 November 1413, in Herat. His father, Jalāl al-Dīn Isḥāq, was judge and imām at court and had his four sons educated in the religious sciences. Like his brothers, ʿAbd al-Razzāq had an ijāza (license to transmit traditions) from the ḥadīth scholar Muḥammad al-Jazarī (d. 833/1429–30). In 841/1437–8, he dedicated to the Tīmūrid ruler Shāh Rukh (r. 811–50/1409…

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad al-Zaylaʿī (c.1820–82) is credited as the first reviver of the Qādiriyya Ṣūfī ṭarīqa (lit., “way,” hence “order”) in Somalia during the second half of the nineteenth century and the eponymous founder of the sub-branch of the order known locally as the Zaylaʿiyya. While the shaykh is regarded as a founder of the modern Qādiriyya in the Horn of Africa, only a few of his works survive, and most of what is known about him is derived from the hagiographical collection Rāḥat al-qalb al-mutwallin fi manāqib al-shaykh ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Zaylaʿī (“Comfort of the uninterru…

Fayṣal b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (1906–75) was one of the sons of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Āl Saʿūd (1880–1953), founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Fayṣal ruled from 1964 to 1975, during a period of strong inter-Arab tensions, the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, and accelerated modernisation, when Saudi Arabia was transformed into a leading oil producer and a major player in Arab politics. Fayṣal was born in Riyadh on 9 April 1906 to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Āl Saʿūd and Ṭarfa bt. Āl al-Shaykh, who died in 1912, when the young princ…

ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Muḥammad al-Munāwī al-Ḥaddādī al-Qāhirī al-Shāfiʿī (952–1031/1545–1622) was an Egyptian Ṣūfī who left an immense written legacy marked by a strong attachment to the Shādhilī ṭarīqa (Ṣūfī order) and to the teachings in the ḥadīth. ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī was born in Cairo to a family known for its knowledge and piety. Originally from Ḥaddāda, a small village near Tunis, the family had settled in Upper Egypt in the early eighth/fourteenth century. It was Saʿd al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Munāwī (d. c.840/1437) who brought his family to Cairo, where he took up the position of qāḍī, but…

ʿAbd al-Salām Ibn Mashīsh al-Ḥasanī (d. probably 625/1227–8) was a “pole” ( quṭb, master of masters) of Maghribī Ṣūfism. His tomb, in Jabal ʿAlam, in the territory of the Banū ʿArūs, is a pre-eminent Moroccan holy site whose importance is not limited to the northern region. Little is known of his personal life; contemporary Moroccan sources scarcely mention him. As shown in a recent study by Zouanat, which carefully assembles all bibliographical references on Ibn Mashīsh, the earliest mentions appear, in a …

The Āl al-Shaykh derive their name from their ancestor, the Ḥanbalī reformer Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1115–1206/1703–92), who was known as “the Shaykh.” The family has dominated the Wahhābī movement and the religious establishment of the three Suʿūdī states (c. 1745 to 1818, 1824 to 1891, and 1902 to the present) and until today they have continued to hold important positions in the religious hierarchy of Saudi Arabia. The Āl al-Shaykh are descended from the Āl Musharraf, who were the most important family of religious scholars in Najd between the tenth/sixte…

Bedil (1814–72), often referred to in Sindhi as “Bedil Rohŕīvāro,” was the pen name of Qādir Bakhsh, a Ṣūfī poet from Rohŕī, in Upper Sindh (he was originally named ʿAbd al-Qādir, like the famous Indo-Persian poet ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil of Pa’na, d. 1720). His father was a devout Muslim who was a dealer in silk goods and was a disciple of a member of the Qādirī dynasty of Sayyids descended from the well-known martyr-saint Shāh ʿInāyat of Jhok (d. 1718). As a young man, Bedil undertook extensive tours of pilgrimage…

ʿAlī b. Khalaf al-Kātib, Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (fl. 437/1045), was the Egyptian Fāṭimid author of an Arabic manual for secretaries or chancery officials. Virtually nothing is known about his life. Al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418), in his encyclopaedia for secretaries, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (Cairo 1913–9), calls him “one of the great secretaries of the (Fāṭimid) dynasty” (6:432, cf. 7:78), and quotes numerous examples of model letters and documents (see especially vol. 9) from his manual Mawādd al-bayān (“The substances of clear exposition”). An incomplete manuscript of thi…

Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad Ibn Abī l-Ashʿath (d. 360/970 or shortly after) was a physician connected to the Ḥamdānid court in Mosul who wrote medical books as well as commentaries on and summaries of the works of Galen. The main source for his life and works is an entry in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s (d. 668/1270) ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (“The best account of the classes of physicians”), which is itself based on information from Abū Saʿīd ʿUbaydallāh b. Bukhtīshūʿ (d. after 450/1058, cf. Ullmann, Medizin, 230). According to the ʿUyūn, Ibn Abī l-Ashʿath was born in Fārs and later moved to …

Bahāʾ al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad b. Abī Naṣr Ibn al-Naḥḥās al-Ḥalabī (d. 698/1299) was an Arab grammarian. He was born at the end of Jumādā II 637/1240 in Aleppo, where he grew up, became a student of philology under Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ibn Yaʿīsh (d. 643/1245), Jamāl al-Dīn Ibn Mālik (d. 672/1274), ʿAbdallāh b. ʿUmar Ibn al-Lattī (d. 635/1237), Abū l-Qāsim ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ḥusayn Ibn Rawāḥa al-Anṣārī (d. 646/1248), Shams al-Dīn Yūsuf Ibn Khalīl (d. 648/1250), ʿAlī b. Shujāʿ al-Kamāl al-…

Aḥmad Khaṭīb of Minangkabau (1860–1916) was a prominent scholar of Islam of Sumatran origin, active in Mecca from the last decade of the nineteenth century until his death. He was considered the most knowledgeable teacher of his day in the Jāwī community in Mecca, a term used for Southeast Asians who come to the Holy City for devotional purposes or study. Aḥmad Khaṭīb was also known for his hostile attitude towards the Dutch. He was born in Kota Gedang, Minangkabau (West Sumatra), in 1860. His grandfather ʿAbdallāh had migrated from the Ḥijāz to West Sumatra to trade…

ʿĀṣim, Abū Bakr ʿĀṣim b. Bahdala Abī l-Najjūd al-Asadī (d. late 127 or early 128/745), was a mawlā (client) of the Banū Judhayma of the Asad. He succeeded Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 74/693–4) as head of the Kufan school of Qurʾān readers, where his pre-eminence in Qurʾānic studies secured him a place as one of the Seven Readers whose systems became binding through Ibn Mujāhid’s (d. 324/936) establishment of a canon of Seven Readings ( qirāʾāt, sing. qirāʾa) of the Qurʾān. Indeed, through his pupil Ḥafṣ b. Sulaymān (d. 180/796) his system of pointing and vowelling th…

Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Barbīr al-Bayrūtī (1160–c.1226/1747–c.1811) was a premodern Arabic author known especially for his maqāmas. He was born in Damietta and in 1183/1769 moved to Beirut and was appointed a Shāfiʿī qāḍī. Soon he resigned, presumably for pious reasons, and opened an elementary school. In 1195/1781 he moved to Damascus, dying there in 1226/1811 or soon after. Al-Barbīr wrote a collection of maqāmas, which has been preserved in manuscript, and a literary debate, Mufākhara bayna l-māʾ wa-l-hawāʾ (Boasting match between water and air), which was printed in…

Al-Dakhwār (d. 628/1230), known as Muhadhdhab al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. ʿAlī, was a pre-eminent and influential physician of the Ayyūbid period (582–658/1186–1260) in Damascus. A great admirer of the works of Galen, he was a prodigy in treating patients and ventured into the field of medications for diseases that were difficult to cure. Born and raised in Damascus, he started out as an oculist, like his father ʿAlī and his brother Ḥāmid, while working as a copyist of manuscripts. He studied medicine under the physicians Raḍī al-Dīn al-Raḥbī (d. 631/1233), Muwaffaq al-Dīn Ibn…

Abū Yazīd ʿAmr b. Qamīʾa al-Ḍubaʿī (fl. first half, sixth century C.E.) was a pre-Islamic Arab poet of the Banū Qays b. Thaʿlaba (Bakr). ʿAmr was born into a family of poets, probably around 480 C.E. (see G. E. von Grunebaum, Orientalia 8, 1939, 345); al-Muraqqish al-Akbar was his uncle, and al-Muraqqish al-Aṣghar and Ṭarafa were his cousins. Apart from these facts it is hard to discern whether the reports about some events in his life are true or fiction: for example, his youth in the household of his uncle Marthad, whose wife tried i…