Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Jawzī—so named after the ford on the Basran canal—ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Qāsim ibn al-Naḍr ibn al-Qāsim ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn al-Qāsim ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr al-Ṣiddīq; the shaykh, ḥadith master, and preacher, Jamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Faraj, universally known as Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Qurashī al-Taymī, the Baghdadi Hanbali.
He was one of the outstanding scholars of his age: he excelled in many branches of learning (1), outstripped his peers therein, and produced both large and small compilations—roughly three hundred works in all—while his own hand penned close to two thousand (2) individual volumes.
In the field of public exhortation he was without precedent (3); no one has matched his stature in that craft, nor his manner and presentation, his eloquence, rhetorical power, the sweetness (4) of his discourse and the grace of its embellishment, the penetrating effect of his admonitions, his plunge into wondrous meanings, and his skill in bringing unfamiliar matters near by drawing (5) on observable, sensory examples. He expressed all this in concise language that was swiftly understood, packing a multitude of ideas into a few words.
In every science he enjoyed the upper hand, sharing actively in all disciplines (6): Qur’anic exegesis, ḥadith, history, arithmetic, astronomy, medicine, jurisprudence, and—besides fiqh—grammar.
His productions in these fields are so numerous that this brief account (7) cannot list or enumerate them all. Yet among his best-known writings (8) is his famous commentary on the Qur’an, Zad al-Masir (9).
He also composed a more expansive tafsir, though it is neither well known nor entirely neglected.
Among his other works is Jamiʿ al-Masānid, in which he collected the greater part of the Musnad of Imam Aḥmad together with the two Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim and the Jamiʿ of al-Tirmidhī. He also authored al-Muntaẓam fī Tawārīkh al-Umam min al-ʿArab wa-l-ʿAjam in twenty volumes; in the present book we have cited many of its events and biographies. He kept recording the affairs of the world until he himself became a chronicle, and how fitting are the poet’s words:
[from al-Basīṭ]