al-Wafayat - li Ibn Qunfudh
- Author died
- 810 AH
- Editions
- Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah
al-Wafayat (Arabic: الوفيات, lit. 'The Obituaries'), also known in full as Sharaf al-talib fi asna al-matalib fi wafayat mukhtalif al-maratib, is a concise chronological biographical dictionary of death dates by the North African scholar and historian Ibn Qunfudh (740–810 AH / 1340–1407 CE) .
Purpose and Scope
Ibn Qunfudh composed the work—either as an independent tract or as a concluding appendix (dhayl) to his commentary on Ibn Farah's poem on hadith nomenclature entitled Sharaf al-talib—to record the death dates of the Companions, hadith transmitters, scholars, and authors across the Islamic world . In his preface, the author noted that hadith scholars maintained records of the death years of narrators to expose dissimulators and forgers (mudallisin); calculating the birth and death years of transmitters served to verify whether a student could historically have met and heard from the authority they claimed to narrate from .
Structure and Methodology
The work covers the chronology of obituaries from the beginning of the Hijri era—commencing with the death of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in 11 AH and that of his daughter Fatimah—down to near the author's own lifetime in the eighth and early ninth centuries AH .
Ibn Qunfudh arranged the material chronologically by centuries (al-mi'in), subdividing each century into successive decades (al-asharat) . Following an opening section on the Mothers of the Believers, he grouped biographical entries by death year under each decade . The biographical notices are deliberately brief, generally restricting information to the subject's name and lineage without extensive praise or biographical narrative .
Continuations and Adaptations
Later historians praised the compact scope and utility of the work, and several scholars composed continuations and adaptations based on it :
- Ibn al-Qadi al-Fasi (d. 1025 AH) wrote a continuation entitled Laqt al-fara'id min lafadat haqqaq al-fawa'id, which covered obituaries chronologically from the start of the eighth century to the end of the year 1000 AH .
- Muhammad ibn Ali al-Fashtali (d. 1021 AH) versified the contents of Ibn Qunfudh's Wafayat from the Prophetic mission through the eighth century into an L-rhyming poem (lamiyyah), extending it to complete a full millennium using abjad chronograms .
- Muhammad al-Qadiri (d. 1187 AH) later appended his Iltiqat al-durar as a further continuation to Ibn al-Qadi's work, covering figures up to the twelfth century AH .
Editions
al-Wafayat has been published in multiple modern editions:
- An edition edited by Adil Nuwayhid, published by Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida in Beirut .
- An edition edited by Muhammad Hajji in Rabat (1396 AH / 1976 CE) within a compendium titled Alf sana min al-wafayat ('A Thousand Years of Obituaries'), which published Ibn Qunfudh's text alongside the obituary works of Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Wansharisi and Ibn al-Qadi .
- Earlier printings appeared in India in 1911 and by Henri Pérès in 1939 .
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