of ʿAjlān, who was the freedman of ʿAbd al-Rahman (1) ibn the Emir ʿIsa ibn Musa al-Hashimi. He is Abu al-ʿAbbas al-Kufi, the erudite ḥāfiẓ, one of the foremost authorities on hadith, a marvel of his age, and the author of numerous works—despite the weakness found in him. He is better known as the ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿUqda.
ʿUqda was the sobriquet of his father, the accomplished grammarian Muhammad ibn Saʿid. He was so nick-named because of the “knots” of difficulty he tied in the science of morphology, and he was one of the scholars who put their knowledge into practice. He lived before the three-hundreds (AH).
Abu al-ʿAbbas was born in 249 AH in Kūfa. He began his search for hadith in the mid-260s AH, and wrote down a quantity from the narrations that is beyond reckoning or description, gathering them from a great many transmitters in Kūfa, Baghdad, and Mecca.
He heard hadith from: Abu Jaʿfar Muhammad ibn ʿUbayd Allah ibn al-Munadi; Ahmad ibn ʿAbd al-Hamid al-Harithi; al-Hasan ibn ʿAli ibn ʿAffan; al-Hasan ibn Mukram; ʿAli ibn Dawud al-Qanṭari; Yahya ibn Abi Talib; Abu Yahya ibn Abi Masrah al-Makki; Ibrahim ibn Abi Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah; ʿAbd Allah ibn Usamah al-Kalbi; Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Hunayni; Ahmad ibn Abi Khaythamah; ʿAbd Allah ibn Rawh al-Madaʾini; Ishaq ibn Ibrahim al-ʿUqayli; Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Sufi; Yaʿqub ibn Yusuf ibn Ziyad; Muhammad ibn Ismaʿil al-Rashidi; ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muhammad al-Raqashi; Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Dunya; Ibrahim ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Qaṣṣar; Abu Muslim al-Kajjī; Abu al-Aḥwaṣ al-ʿUkbarī; Muhammad ibn Saʿid al-ʿAwfi; Mahmud ibn Abi al-Madaʾ al-Halabi; Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn al-Hasan al-Qaṭawani; al-Hasan ibn ʿUtbah al-Kindī; ʿAbd Allah ibn Ahmad ibn al-Mustawrid; and al-Hasan ibn—