- The ghāzī (frontier fighter) Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad—shaykh, imam, ḥāfiẓ, meticulous scholar, reliable transmitter, devout and much-travelled—his full name being Abū Naṣr Aḥmad ibn ʿUmar ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad al-Iṣbahānī, known as al-Ghāzī.
He was born around the year 448 AH.
He journeyed far and wide, roaming the lands and amassing ḥadith in abundance.
He studied under Abū al-Ḥusayn ibn al-Naqqūr, ʿAbd al-Bāqī ibn Muḥammad al-ʿAṭṭār, Abū al-Qāsim ibn al-Busrī and several others in Baghdad; Abū ʿAlī al-Tustarī in Basra; Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Muẓaffarī in Sarakhs; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Mandah and his brother Abū ʿAmr; Ibn Shakruwayh (1); many scholars in Isfahan; al-Faḍl ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muḥibb and his cohort in Nishapur; and Abū ʿĀmir al-Azdī, Abū Ismāʿīl al-Anṣārī, and their contemporaries in Herat.
Among those who transmitted from him were al-Silafī, al-Samʿānī, Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī, Ibn ʿAsākir, al-Muʾayyad ibn al-Ikhwah, Maḥmūd ibn Aḥmad al-Muḍarī (2), and others.
Al-Silafī said: “He was a man of knowledge and memorisation; we listened to many narrations read by him, and he dictated to me (3).”