ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Jazarī, al-Shaybānī, the son of Shaykh al-Athīr Abū al-Karam, is the author of the monumental universal history popularly called al-Kāmil and of the work Maʿrifat al-Ṣaḥābah (1).

He was born on the Jazīrah of Ibn ʿUmar in 555 AH, and there he and his two brothers—the scholar Majd al-Dīn and the minister Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn—were raised. Their father later moved the family to Mosul, where the brothers attended lessons, applied themselves, excelled, and rose to prominence.

Among those from whom he received hadith were the preacher Abū al-Faḍl al-Ṭūsī, Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Thaqafī, and Muslim ibn ʿAlī al-Sīḥī. When he entered Baghdad as the envoy of ʿAbd al-Munʿim ibn Kulayb, he studied under Yaʿīsh ibn Ṣadaqah and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Sukaynah; and in Damascus he learned from Abū al-Qāsim ibn Ṣaṣrā and Zayn al-Umanaʾ.

He was an imām, a foremost scholar, a historian, a man of letters skilled in many disciplines, a dignified leader whose house was a refuge for seekers of knowledge. In the closing years of his life he devoted himself wholly to hadith, acquiring both higher and lower chains of transmission.

His writings include his History of Mosul—which he did not finish—and an abridged, refined version of al-Samʿānī’s al-Ansāb.

He travelled to Greater Syria as an emissary and narrated hadith in Damascus and Aleppo.