187 – Ibn Zarqūn, Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd al-Anṣārī

The Shaykh of the Mālikīs, Abū al-Ḥusayn Muḥammad, son of the great imam Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Saʿīd ibn Aḥmad al-Anṣārī of Seville, known as Ibn Zarqūn.

He studied under his father, under Ibn al-Jadd, under Abū al-ʿAbbās Ibn Maḍāʾ, and under a number of other scholars.

He excelled in jurisprudence and authored al-Muʿallā fī al-Radd ʿalā al-Muḥallā (“The Lofty Refutation of the Muḥallā”).

It is said that he received an ijāzah (teaching licence) from Abū Marwān Ibn Quzmān. He was put on trial, then manacled and imprisoned after the authorities had resolved to execute him for teaching fiqh, for the ruler of the West, Yūsuf ibn Yaʿqūb, had categorically forbidden the study of the furūʿ (the detailed branches of law). He pressed the matter to extremes and obliged the populace to derive fiqh solely from the Qurʾān and the Sunnah in the fashion of the Ahl al-Ẓāhir. From 580 AH onward the students of the Maghrib were brought up on this approach.

Qāḍī Abū al-Ḥusayn was a consummate man of letters, composing both verse and prose. He possessed a perfect intellect and an even temperament—rarely would eyes behold his like. The sultan seized him, together with another scholar who was likewise teaching the furūʿ; both were brought forward for slow execution, then shackled and jailed in 590 AH. His companion died, while his own imprisonment dragged on. Ibn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin tightened the measures still further, decreeing that anyone found in possession of even a single sheet of the furūʿ was to be executed without appeal; public sermons were delivered to announce this—consider the magnitude of that calamity!—and the books of the two scholars were burned.

Among Abū al-Ḥusayn’s works are Fiqh Ḥadīth Barīrah and Quṭb al-Sharīʿah (“The Pivot of the Law”). A great many people transmitted from him.