al-Ghunya fi Shuyukh al-Qadi Iyad
- Author died
- 544 AH
- Editions
- Dar al-Gharb al-Islami
al-Ghunya fi Shuyukh al-Qadi Iyad (The Sufficiency: Catalogue of the Teachers of al-Qadi Iyad) is a biographical catalogue (fahrasa) compiled by the Andalusian–Maghrebi Maliki jurist and hadith scholar al-Qadi Iyad (476–544 AH / 1083–1149 CE) to document his teachers, chains of transmission, and received works .
Purpose and Composition
In the introduction to the work, al-Qadi Iyad states that he wrote the book in response to persistent requests from students seeking clarification of his narrations, auditions (masmūʿāt), and compilations, and requesting formal certification (ijāzah) from him . Rather than attempting an exhaustive inventory of every text he had ever studied, he chose to present a concise selection of his primary transmissions, refer generally to his teachers' own personal catalogues (fahāris), and provide concise biographical accounts of each teacher .
Structure and Content
The work systematically covers the scholars from whom al-Qadi Iyad received knowledge across various disciplines. These include teachers from whom he studied via direct audition (samāʿ), reading back to the teacher (qirāʾah), book transmission by authorization (munāwalah), and formal written license (ijāzah) from scholars residing elsewhere whom he never met in person . In addition to his formal transmitters, the author also includes brief notices on prominent scholars he met, sat with, or debated with (mudhākarah) without transmitting from them, as well as those from whom he heard only minor amounts due to travel interruptions or their lack of precision in transmission .
According to his son Muhammad, the total number of teachers recorded in the catalogue—encompassing those from whom he heard directly, those who granted him written ijāzah, and those he met without receiving direct transmission—reaches approximately one hundred scholars, with modern counts listing ninety-eight individual entries . Among the prominent authorities profiled in the text are Abu Ali al-Sadafi, Abu Ali al-Jayyani, Abu Bakr al-Turtushi, Abu Abd Allah al-Mazari, Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, and Ibn Rushd al-Jadd .
In addition to personal biographies, al-Ghunya records the transmission lines for major canonical works of hadith, including Sahih al-Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, the Sunan of Abu Dawud, and the Musnad of Baqi ibn Makhlad, along with texts on Quranic sciences, Arabic language, and theological discourse .
Modern Editions
The work has been edited and published in modern scholarly editions:
- An edition edited by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim, published by al-Dar al-Arabiyya lil-Kitab in Libya and Tunisia (1398 AH / 1978 CE) .
- A critical edition edited by Maher Zuhair Jarrar, published by Dar al-Gharb al-Islami in Beirut (1402 AH / 1982 CE) .
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