234 – Ibn al-Fakhkhār, Muḥammad b. ʿUmar b. Yūsuf al-Qurṭubī *

The Imām, erudite scholar, ḥadīth master, Shaykh al-Islām, and leading authority of al-Andalus: Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿUmar b. Yūsuf b. al-Fakhkhār al-Qurṭubī, a Mālikī.

He was born in the early 340s AH.

He transmitted ḥadīth from Abū ʿĪsā al-Laythī, Abū Muḥammad al-Bājī, Abū Jaʿfar b. ʿAwn Allāh, and their contemporaries. He performed the pilgrimage and, while in Egypt, heard narrations from a number of scholars.

He later resided in Medina.

He studied jurisprudence under Abū Muḥammad al-Aṣīlī and Abū ʿUmar b. al-Makwī.

He was a foremost jurist, outstanding in asceticism, celebrated for his prodigious memory, extraordinarily intelligent, thoroughly versed in areas of consensus and disagreement, and without peer. He had memorised the Mudawwanah in its entirety, as well as the Nawādir of Abū Muḥammad b. Abī Zayd (1).

He was asked to act as an envoy to the Berber princes, but refused, saying, “I am unsuited to this and fear that I may be harmed.”

The vizier remarked, “And does a righteous man fear death?!”

He replied, “If I fear it, then the prophets of God feared it as well. Here is Moses, of whom Allah says: ‘So I fled from you when I feared you’ (2) (Q 26:21).”

Ibn Ḥayyān said: “The jurist, the ḥadīth master whose counsel was sought, a scholar of vast learning, passed away…"