215 – al-Balkhī, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Aḥmad ibn Khalaf
The shaykh, scholar, traditionist, Qurʾān reciter, and master of melodic intonation, Najm al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr ibn Aḥmad ibn Khalaf ibn al-Nūr, originally from Balkh and later associated with Damascus.
He was born in the year five hundred and “something-and-fifty”⦗1⦘⦗2⦘ AH.
He met al-Silafī, who granted him a licence and stated that he had heard from him and found him reliable, although no explicit record of that audition has survived. While in Alexandria, however, he did hear a fascicle from al-Muṭahhar ibn Khalaf al-Shahhāmī in 575 AH. In Cairo he heard from al-Tāj al-Masʿūdī and al-Qāsim ibn ʿAsākir, and in Egypt in 572 AH he heard from Manṣūr ibn Ṭāhir al-Dimashqī the Wadaʿānī Forty. In Damascus he heard from Ḥanbal and others, and he transmitted a great deal by written authorization.
Among those who narrated from him were Ibn al-Ṣābūnī, Ibn al-Ẓāhirī, al-Dimyāṭī, Jawzah al-Balkhiyya, al-Badr Muḥammad ibn al-Tūzī, al-ʿImād ibn al-Bālīsī, al-Jamāl ʿAlī ibn al-Shāṭibī, Ibrāhīm ibn al-Ẓāhirī, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-Maqdisī, and Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zarrād.
From the earlier generation, Zakī al-Dīn al-Mundhirī also related from him.
Al-Dimyāṭī said: “He was righteous and possessed very early auditions. He was born in Darb al-ʿAjam and died on the twenty-fourth of Rabīʿ al-Ākhir in 653 AH, at the age of ninety-six.”
In that same year there also died the hadith scholar and jurist Kamāl al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm, the father of our female teacher⦗3⦘, and the hadith scholar and Qurʾān reciter Nāṣiḥ al-Dīn Abū Bakr ibn Yūsuf al-Ḥarrānī.