Imam Ibn Hajar Al-Asqalani

Imam Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani: a portrait in eight points

• Full name: Shihab al-Din Abu al-Fadl Ahmad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Hajar al-Kinani al-Asqalani (ابن حجر العسقلاني). His family came from Asqalan, in Palestine.
• Birth: in Sha'ban 773 AH, corresponding to 1372, in Old Cairo, in a house on the bank of the Nile. The biographers disagree on the exact day.
• Childhood: his mother died while he was a child, his father in Rajab 777. He was raised by a guardian, a leading merchant of Cairo, entered Quran school before the age of five and completed memorisation of the Quran at nine.
• School: Shafi'i. He studied fiqh under al-Bulqini and devoted himself to hadith from 796, the year he also began to write.
• Offices: chief judge of the Shafi'is of Egypt, mufti, teacher in the greatest madrasas of Cairo. He resigned from the judiciary on 25 Jumada al-Akhirah 852, a few months before his death.
• Title: Commander of the Faithful in hadith, a distinction the tradition reserves for a handful of scholars.
• Output: more than one hundred and fifty titles, including فتح الباري, the commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, begun in 817 and completed a quarter of a century later.
• Death: on the night of Saturday, at the end of Dhu al-Hijjah 852, corresponding to February 1449, in Cairo. The caliph and the sultan attended his funeral.

An orphan of Old Cairo, chief of the judges

Ahmad ibn Ali was born in 773 in a house of Old Cairo overlooking the Nile. His father, a scholar and poet, wanted a literary education for him. He would not have time to provide it: the mother died first, the father in Rajab 777, and the child grew up an orphan in the care of a guardian, a leading merchant of the city, who took his upbringing seriously. Entering Quran school before the age of five, he had memorised the Quran by nine, then the primers of hadith, fiqh and grammar.

The turning point came in 796. He was twenty-three, and resolved to devote himself to hadith. That same year he began to write. He would not stop until the eve of his death. One of his biographers reports that his works circulated during his lifetime, that kings presented them to one another, and that the great copied them in their own hand.

His career followed: teaching in the most prestigious madrasas of Cairo, the office of mufti, then the judiciary up to the post of chief judge of the Shafi'is of Egypt. He did not care for that last position. He himself relates that a man had travelled to meet him and turned back on learning that he had accepted the judgeship, which he records as a lesson rather than an affront. He resigned in Jumada al-Akhirah 852. Six months later he died. His funeral gathered the caliph, the sultan, the scholars and a crowd the chroniclers describe as unprecedented. A shower of rain fell on his bier as it reached the place of prayer.

Twenty-five years for one commentary

On every hard question that follows, the conversation returns sooner or later to this book.

Ibn Hajar began his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari in 817, dictating it to his students. He completed it a quarter of a century later. In between, he never stopped returning to it, adding and correcting, and the biographers report that he regarded this work as the most important of everything he had written. Posterity agreed, in a phrase that has become famous, turning a well-known hadith to new purpose: there is no more emigration after the conquest, meaning, no need for any other commentary after the Fath.

What makes the work valuable lies in its method. For each hadith, Ibn Hajar assembles the variants, discusses the chains, explains the vocabulary, sets out the positions of the legal schools, and above all elucidates the meaning of al-Bukhari's chapter headings, which are known to carry the author's own thinking. It is a work of synthesis on a scale no one has repeated since.

For the buyer, two consequences. The first is that the Fath is not a reading but a library, in more than a dozen volumes, reserved for those who seriously study the Sahih. The second is that the work has itself given rise to abridgements and selections, such as the one Sheikh Abd al-Muhsin al-Abbad al-Badr drew from it in several volumes, which allow one to approach its substance without taking on the whole.

At both ends of the scale

Here is the feature that sets Ibn Hajar apart from almost every author in this series, and that directly guides the purchase.

The same man who wrote a thirteen-volume commentary also wrote the two shortest and most memorised primers of his discipline. نخبة الفكر fits in a few pages and sums up the whole terminology of hadith: generations of students have learned it by heart before approaching anything else. بلوغ المرام gathers the hadiths on which the rules of fiqh rest, arranged by chapter, in a compact volume that is likewise memorised.

These two texts are not bought like the others. What you need is a pocket edition, fully vocalised, on sturdy paper, made to be carried and reread a hundred times. Then, separately, a commentary: for the Nukhba, the one Ibn Hajar wrote himself, نزهة النظر; for the Bulugh, one of the classical or contemporary commentaries that accompany it. The common mistake is to buy a large annotated edition from the outset and never have the bare text to hand at the moment of memorising it.

His works

فتح الباري بشرح صحيح البخاري

The commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari, in thirteen volumes and more depending on the edition. His great work, and the absolute reference on the collection. A library purchase.

بلوغ المرام من أدلة الأحكام

The collection of hadiths that ground the legal rulings, arranged by chapters of fiqh. A primer memorised in every curriculum, commented on without interruption for five centuries.

نخبة الفكر في مصطلح أهل الأثر

The summary of hadith terminology, in a few pages. The first text memorised in the discipline.

نزهة النظر في توضيح نخبة الفكر

His own commentary on the Nukhba, of moderate length. To be bought alongside the text, not in its place.

الإصابة في تمييز الصحابة

The biographical dictionary of the Companions, in several volumes. The reference work for identifying a Companion and distinguishing namesakes.

تهذيب التهذيب

His dictionary of the narrators of the six major collections, in several volumes, with the assessments made of each.

تقريب التهذيب

The condensed version of the preceding, in one or two volumes: for each narrator, one line, one assessment, one generation. The verification tool most used on a daily basis.

لسان الميزان

His supplement to al-Dhahabi's work on criticised narrators.

الدرر الكامنة في أعيان المائة الثامنة

The biographical dictionary of the notable figures of the eighth century AH. A historian's work, much consulted on the Mamluk period.

To these should be added his sourcing of the hadiths cited in works of fiqh, his chronicles, his collections of fatwas, and more than a hundred other titles.

The directory of narrators

A third of his output, by volume, is not meant to be read: these are directories.

The science of hadith rests on the assessment of men. To judge a chain of transmission, one must know who each narrator was, when he lived, whom he met, what the critics said of his memory and his probity. Ibn Hajar gathered, condensed and ordered this knowledge in a series of dictionaries that remain, five centuries later, the daily instruments of everyone who practises the discipline. A student of hadith opens the Taqrib more often than any other book.

These works are not for the reader who is just discovering the field. They are for the one who has already learned to read a chain and wants to verify it himself. If you are not there yet, they will wait on the shelf without serving you. If you are, the Taqrib is the most useful purchase you will make this year.

Buy Imam Ibn Hajar's books in Arabic

Every book sold by My Maktaba is in Arabic, in its original edition, and every one is new. For each title, the listing states the publisher, year, number of volumes, format, type of binding and whether the text is vocalised, this last point being decisive for the two texts to be memorised.

A word on sequence. Start with Bulugh al-Maram in a vocalised pocket edition: the hadiths are short, the arrangement by chapters of fiqh gives a thread, and the legal vocabulary settles through repetition. The Nukhba comes next, when you want to understand the terms that qualify each hadith. The Fath, finally, when you have read the Sahih and want to understand it in depth. In that order, each purchase prepares the next.