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Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Barr (368/978–463/1071)

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr was born in Cordoba and spent his entire life studying and teaching in Andalusia, including 23 years as a judge in Lisbon. Orphaned at age 12, he benefitted from his father’s personal library and respected reputation as a scholar. He is primarily remembered as a master traditionist (ḥāfiẓ) and an expert in the science of hadith transmitters (ʿilm al-rijāl). His expertise also extended, however, to other disciplines, such as law, history, Qur’ānic recitation, and genealogy. He played an instrumental role in the transmission of hadith books in Andalusia. During his lifetime, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr was regarded as a scholar of hadith and hadith transmitters par excellence, attracting students from far and wide to the point where students would brag about having acquired a chain of transmission from him. Although widely known as a scholar of Mālikī law, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr began his career as a Ẓāhirī, a now defunct school of law whose distinctive doctrine was based on a rejection of all methods of legal reasoning that justified departure from revelation’s plain sense. After he became convinced of the validity of legal analogy (qiyās), however, a doctrine the Ẓāhirīs rejected, he converted to Mālikism and authored highly regarded works of law within the Mālikī school, such as al-Kāfī fī fiqh ahl al-Madīna. His independent-mindedness, and his continued predisposition to favor hadith-based legal reasoning, however, is evidenced by his tendency to prefer at times opinions of other legal schools, particularly the relatively more hadith-friendly Shāfiʿīs.

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s commentaries on the Muwaṭṭaʾ earned him unanimous recognition by posterity as a hadith scholar of the highest calibre. The most famous and in-depth of his works in this genre is al-Tamhīd li-mā fī l-Muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa-l-asānīd (“The Introduction to the meanings and chains of transmission contained in the Muwaṭṭaʾ”), which in some editions reaches 26 volumes. The Tamhīd focuses only on the 853 prophetic reports of the Muwaṭṭaʾ. In it, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr remarks on the difficult and time-consuming nature of the study of chains of transmission. But because Mālik’s transmissions are authentic, he continues, one could save himself the exhaustion that comes with searching for reliable chains of transmissions by limiting himself to Mālik’s collection. After a lengthy introduction on the science of chains of transmission, the author justifies Mālik’s use of mursal reports (those omitting the name of the Companion who originally narrated the report from the Prophet) and defends their normativity when the individual closest in the chain to the Prophet is reliable. Additionally, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr comments on the chains of transmission in the Muwaṭṭaʾ and provides legal and doctrinal glosses on the hadiths. The Tamhīd was Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s (successful) attempt to establish the Muwaṭṭaʾ’s authenticity and canonical status alongside the Saḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) and Muslim (d. 261/875). He did so by mustering parallel, uninterrupted chains of transmission for the truncated chains of transmission that Mālik provided in the Muwaṭṭaʾ in order to bolster confidence in those in the Muwaṭṭaʾ and demonstrate their authenticity. Ultimately, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr located complete chains of transmission for all but four hadiths cited in the Muwaṭṭaʾ, though Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ (d. 643/1245) furnished complete chains for the remainder two centuries later. By virtue of these efforts, the 18th century Egyptian commentator on the Muwaṭṭaʾ, ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Bāqī al-Zurqānī (d. 1710) could say, “The truth is that [all the Prophetic reports in] the Muwaṭṭaʾ are ṣaḥīḥ [authentic] with no exceptions.”

The second of his commentaries on the Muwaṭṭaʾ, al-Taqaṣṣī li-mā fī al-Muwaṭṭaʾ min ḥadīth al-nabī (“The deep investigation of the Muwaṭṭaʾ’s prophetic hadiths”) (a.k.a. Tajrīd al-tamhīd, “The condensation of the Tamhīd”), also falls under the genre of hadith studies. It is a condensed version of the Tamhīd that is meant to be more accessible and used alongside it. In both the Tamhīd and the Taqaṣṣī, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr remarks that he relied on Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā al-Laythī’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ because of the reverence in which Yaḥyā was held amongst Andalusian scholars, and due to his recension’s widespread circulation.

Al-Istidhkār li-madhāhib al-amṣār fī mā taḍammanahu al-Muwaṭṭaʾ min maʿānī al-raʾy wa-l-āthār (“Reciting the legal doctrines of the various cities concerning the legal contents of the Muwaṭṭaʾ and its legal precedents”) is Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s third commentary on the Muwaṭṭaʾ. It is a voluminous, encyclopedic work of comparative law organized according to Yaḥyā’s recension of the Muwaṭṭaʾ, and preserves thousands of legal opinions belonging to Companions, Successors, and other early Muslim jurists.

 

Bibliography

Brown, Jonathan, The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim (Leiden: Brill 2007)

al-Dhahabī, Shams al-Dīn, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arna’ūṭ (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 1985)

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf, Ikhtilāf aqwāl Mālik wa aṣḥābihi, ed. Miklos Murayni and Muḥammad Ḥamīd Laḥmar (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2003)

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf, al-Istidhkār li-madhāhib al-amṣār fī mā taḍammanahu al-Muwaṭṭaʾ min maʿānī al-raʾy wa-l-āthār, ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Amīn Qalʿajī (Aleppo/Cairo: Dār al-Waʿī and Damascus/Beirut: Dār Qutayba li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1993/1414)

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Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf, Kitāb al-kāfī fī fiqh ahl al-Madīna al-Mālikī, ed. Muḥammad Muḥammad Aḥīd Wuld Mādīk al-Mūrītānī (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Riyāḍ al-Ḥadīthah, 1980)

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf, al-Tamhīd li-mā fī l-Muwaṭṭaʾ min al-maʿānī wa-l-asānīd, ed. Muṣṭafā b. Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī et al. (Rabat: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya, 1967/1387–1992/1412)

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf, al-Taqaṣṣī li-mā fī al-Muwaṭṭaʾ min ḥadīth al-nabī, ed. Fayṣal Yūsuf Aḥmad al-ʿAlī and al-Ṭāhir al-Azhar Khudhayrī (Kuwait City: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya, 2012/1433)

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Lucas, Scott C., EI2, s.v. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr

al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā, Abū al-Faḍl, Tartīb al-madārik wa taqrīb al-masālik li-maʿrifat aʿlām madhhab Mālik, ed. Muḥammad Tāwīt al-Ṭanjī et al., 2nd edition (Morocco: Wizārat al-Awqāf wa-l-Shuʾūn al-Islāmiyya, 1982-3/1402-3)