359 – Ibn ʿAbdān, Aḥmad ibn ʿAbdān ibn Muḥammad al-Shīrāzī*

The eminent imām, ḥadith master (ḥāfiẓ), exceptionally long-lived and reliable authority: Abū Bakr Aḥmad ibn ʿAbdān ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Faraj al-Shīrāzī, the Shaykh of Ahwaz and chief musnid of his time.

He transmitted ḥadith from Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Bāghandī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Baghawī, Ibn Ṣāʿid, Ibn Abī Dāwūd, Bakr ibn Aḥmad al-Zuhrī, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Sakan, and several others.

Among those who reported from him are Hamzah al-Sahami, Ismāʿīl ibn Muḥammad al-Jīruftī ⦗1⦘, the judge ʿAlī ibn ʿUbayd Allāh al-Kisāʾī, Abū al-Hasan ibn Ṣakhr, and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Ghandajānī, who received from him the Great History of al-Bukhārī (Tārīkh al-Bukhārī al-Kabīr).

He was known by the sobriquet “the White Falcon.” Hamzah ibn Yūsuf sought his expertise on narrator criticism and accreditation (al-jarḥ wa’l-taʿdīl) and on the identification of hidden defects (ʿilal).

He was born in 293 AH and passed away in Ṣafar 388 AH at the age of ninety-five.

He resided in Shiraz for a time, then spent thirty years in Ahwaz. Although famed for the strength of his memory, he diminished his own renown by remaining in the mountains of Ahwaz.