ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, short for Muwaffaq al-Dīn Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn Yūsuf al-Baghdādī, was a physician, philosopher, historian, Arabic grammarian and traveler, and one of the most voluminous writers in the Near East of his time.
Madrasa is the Arabic word for any type of educational institution, secular or religious, whether for elementary instruction or higher learning. The word is variously transliterated madrasah, medresa, madrassa, madraza, medrese, etc. In countries outside the Arab world, the word usually refers to a specific type of religious school or college for the study of the religion of Islam, though this may not be the only subject studied.
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80 000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim world.
Sir Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, known as H. A. R. Gibb, was a Scottish historian on Orientalism.
Ibn Qudāmah al-Maqdisī Muwaffaq al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad , often referred to as Ibn Qudamah or Ibn Qudama for short, was a Sunni Muslim ascetic, jurisconsult, Traditionalist theologian. Having authored many important treatises on Islamic jurisprudence and religious doctrine, including one of the standard works of Hanbali law, the revered al-Mug̲h̲nī, Ibn Qudamah is highly regarded in Sunnism for being one of the most notable and influential thinkers of the Hanbali school of orthodox Sunni jurisprudence. Within that school, he is one of the few thinkers to be given the honorific epithet of Shaykh of Islam, which is a prestigious title bestowed by Sunnis on some of the most important thinkers of their tradition. A proponent of the classical Sunni position of the "differences between the scholars being a mercy," Ibn Qudamah is famous for having said: "The consensus of the Imams of jurisprudence is an overwhelming proof and their disagreement is a vast mercy."
Franz Rosenthal was the Louis M. Rabinowitz professor of Semitic languages at Yale from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985.
David Samuel Margoliouth, FBA was an English orientalist. He was briefly active as a priest in the Church of England. He was Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1889 to 1937.
Alfred Guillaume was a British Christian Arabist, scholar of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament scholar.
Abu al-Wafa Ali Ibn Aqil ibn Ahmad al-Baghdadi (1040–1119) was an Islamic theologian from Baghdad, Iraq. He was trained in the tenets of the Hanbali school (madhab) for eleven years under scholars such as the Qadi Abu Ya'la. Despite this, Ibn Aqil was forced into hiding by the Hanbalis for frequenting the circles of groups who were at odds with the Hanbali tradition. In one of his reminiscences, he remarks that his Hanbali companions wanted him to abandon the company of certain scholars, and complains that it hindered him from acquiring useful knowledge.
Hugh Nigel Kennedy is a British medieval historian and academic. He specialises in the history of the early Islamic Middle East, Muslim Iberia and the Crusades. From 1997 to 2007, he was Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London.
Christopher Melchert is an American professor and scholar of Islam, specialising in Islamic movements and institutions, especially in the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. A prolific author, he is professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Oxford's Oriental Institute, and is a Fellow in Arabic at Pembroke College, Oxford.
An ijazah is a license authorizing its holder to transmit a certain text or subject, which is issued by someone already possessing such authority. It is particularly associated with transmission of Islamic religious knowledge. The license usually implies that the student has acquired this knowledge from the issuer of the ijaza through first-hand oral instruction, although this requirement came to be relaxed over time. An ijaza providing a chain of authorized transmitters going back to the original author often accompanied texts of hadith, fiqh and tafsir, but also appeared in mystical, historical, and philological works, as well as literary collections. While the ijaza is primarily associated with Sunni Islam, the concept also appears in the hadith traditions of Twelver Shia.
Al-Nizamiyya of Baghdad, one of the first nezamiyehs, was established in 1065. In July 1091, Nizam al-Mulk appointed the 33-year-old Al-Ghazali as a professor of the school. Offering free education, it has been described as the "largest university of the Medieval world". Ibn Tumart, founder of the Berber Almohad dynasty, reputedly attended the school and studied under al-Ghazali. Nizam al-Mulk's son-in-law Mughatil ibn Bakri was also employed by the school. In 1096, when al-Ghazali left the nezamiyeh, it housed 3000 students. In 1116, Muhammad al-Shahrastani taught at the nezamiyeh. In the 1170s, statesman Beha Ud-Din taught at the nezamiyeh, before he moved on to teach in Mosul.
Wael B. Hallaq is a scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is considered a leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies, and he has been described as one of the world's leading authorities on Sunni fiqh, or jurisprudence.
Aziz Suryal Atiya was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies.
George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics.
During the high medieval period, the Islamic world was at its cultural peak, supplying information and ideas to Europe, via Al-Andalus, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant. These included Latin translations of the Greek Classics and of Arabic texts in astronomy, mathematics, science, and medicine. Translation of Arabic philosophical texts into Latin "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world", with a particularly strong influence of Muslim philosophers being felt in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics. Other contributions included technological and scientific innovations via the Silk Road, including Chinese inventions such as paper and gunpowder.
The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic, and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 14th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, where Islamic scholars and polymaths from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the known world's classical knowledge into Syriac and Arabic.
Muhammad bin Umar bin Abd al-Rahman bin Abd Allah al-Aqil, better known as Abu Abd al-Rahman Ibn Aqil al-Zahiri, is a Saudi Arabian polymath. He has, at various times, been referred to as a theologian, jurist, historian, ethnographer, geographer, poet, critic and author. As a member of Saudi Arabia's "Golden Generation," he knew of life both during the poverty of the pre-oil boom era and the prosperity of the 1950s onward.
The Ẓāhirī madhhab or al-Ẓāhirīyyah is a school of Islamic jurisprudence founded by Dawud al-Zahiri in the ninth century, characterised by reliance on the outward (ẓāhir) meaning of expressions in the Qur'an and hadith, as well as rejection of analogical deduction (qiyās). After a limited success and decline in the Middle East, the Ẓāhirī school flourished in the Caliphate of Córdoba, particularly under the leadership of ibn Hazm, whose book Al-Muhalla is considered to be adiwalu al fiqhi dhahiri. It is variously said to have "survived for about 500 years in various forms" before being "merged with the Ḥanbalī school", but also to have been revived in the mid-20th century in parts of the Muslim world.
