Fihrisat Ibn Khayr
- Author died
- 575 AH
- Editions
- T al-Ilmiyya · t Bashshar
Fihrisat Ibn Khayr (fully titled Fihrisat ma rawahu ‘an shuyukhihi min al-dawawin al-musannafah fi durub al-‘ilm wa-anwa‘ al-ma‘arif, "Index of What He Narrated from His Teachers of Compilations in the Fields of Knowledge and Categories of Lore") is a major bibliographical and transmission catalogue compiled by the Andalusian traditionist, Qur'anic reader, and grammarian Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Khayr al-Ishbili (502–575 AH / 1109–1179 CE) .
Purpose and Scope
In Western Islamic scholarly tradition (al-Maghrib and al-Andalus), works documenting a scholar’s transmissions and authorized readings from teachers were commonly termed fihrisah or barnamaj, corresponding to the genre known in the Islamic East (al-Mashriq) as thabat or mashyakhah . Ibn Khayr compiled this work to record the comprehensive network of books, diwans, and treatises he transmitted, connecting each text via verified transmission chains (asānīd) through more than one hundred direct teachers back to their original authors .
The work documents Andalusian intellectual networks across various branches of Islamic scholarship, including:
- Qur'anic recitations (qirā’āt), orthography, and exegesis
- Hadith collections, Sunan, and legal traditions
- Maliki and comparative jurisprudence (fiqh) and legal foundations (uṣūl)
- Arabic linguistics, lexicography, grammar, and poetic anthologies
- Independent transmission catalogues (fahāris) compiled by earlier scholars, such as those of Abu Ali al-Ghassani al-Jayyani, Abu Amr al-Dani, Abu Umar ibn Abd al-Barr, Abu Ali al-Sadafi, Abu Tahir al-Silafi, and Ibn Bashkuwal .
The book is also notable for recording the transmission lines of Eastern literary and linguistic texts brought into al-Andalus, including works imported from Baghdad by Abu Ali al-Qali in 328 AH during the reign of Abd al-Rahman III (al-Nasir) .
Structure
According to a transmission preserved by Ibn al-Abbar on the authority of Jabir ibn Ahmad al-Qurashi, Ibn Khayr described his fihrisah as comprising ten parts (ajzā’), with each part containing thirty leaves (waraqah) . Ibn al-Abbar praised the catalogue as an extraordinarily rich and beneficial compilation (fī ghāyat al-iḥtifāl wa-al-ifādah), noting that no peer of Ibn Khayr’s generation produced a work of comparable scope .
Editions
The work survived in a manuscript preserved in the Library of El Escorial . It has been published in several editions:
- An editio princeps prepared by Francisco Codera Zaydín and Julián Ribera Tarragó, published in Zaragoza (Zaragoza/Sarakusta) in 1893 as part of the Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana series, and subsequently reprinted in Cairo (Mu'assasat al-Khanji, 1382 AH / 1963 CE) and Beirut (Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, 1399 AH / 1979 CE) .
- An edition edited by Muhammad Fu'ad Mansur, published in Beirut by Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah (1419 AH / 1998 CE) .
- A critical edition edited by Bashar Awwad Ma'ruf and Mahmud Bashar Ma'ruf, published in Tunis by Dar al-Gharb al-Islami (2009 CE) .
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