Al Dhahabi

Biography

Al-Dhahabi was born in Damascus on 5 October 1274, where his family had lived from the time of his grandfather `Uthman. He sometimes identified himself as Ibn al-Dhahabi (son of the goldsmith) in reference to 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, after which he returned to Damascus, where he taught and authored many works and achieved wide renown as a perspicuous critic and expert examiner of the hadith, encyclopedic historian and biographer, and foremost authority in the canonical readings of the Qur'an. He studied under more than 100 women. His most important teacher at Baalbek included a woman, Zaynab bint ʿUmar b. al-Kindī.

He lost his sight two years before he died, leaving three children: his eldest daughter Amat al-`Aziz and his two sons `Abd Allah and Abu Hurayra `Abd al-Rahman. The latter taught the hadith masters Ibn Nasir-ud-din al-Damishqi and Ibn Hajar, to whom he transmitted several works authored or narrated by his father.

Teachers

Among al-Dhahabi's most notable teachers in hadith, fiqh and aqida:

His famous students

Works

Dhahabi authored nearly a hundred works, some of them of considerable size. His work regarding the practice of prophetic medicine was straightforward in its presentation, but also categorized by the author as alternative medicine. Much of it consisted of an integration of medicine as understood from the revelations of the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the practices of Pre-Islamic Arabia with Ancient Greek medicine, quoting heavily from the ideas and terminologies of Hippocrates and Ibn Sina.

List of popular works