Tabaqat al-Huffaz li al-Suyuti
- Author died
- 911 AH
- Editions
- Dar al-Kutub al-'Ilmiyyah
Tabaqat al-Huffaz (The Generations of Hadith Memorizers) is a biographical dictionary of master hadith scholars by the Egyptian polymath al-Jalal al-Suyuti (d. 911 AH / 1505 CE) . It serves as an abridgment and continuation of Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi's (d. 748 AH / 1348 CE) biographical compendium Tadhkirat al-Huffaz .
Purpose and Scope
Al-Suyuti outlines the purpose of the work in his brief introduction, stating that it is dedicated to the ranks of hadith memorizers ( al-huffaz ) and the authoritative evaluators of prophetic knowledge whose independent judgment ( ijtihad ) is relied upon for declaring narrators trustworthy ( tawthiq ), disparaging them ( tajrih ), weakening narrations ( tad'if ), or authenticating them ( tashih ) . Al-Suyuti condensed the core material from al-Dhahabi's Tabaqat and supplemented it with an appendix ( dhayl ) covering prominent hadith masters who lived after al-Dhahabi's era .
Structure and Contents
The book is organized chronologically into twenty-four generational classes ( tabaqat ) :
- The First Class: Dedicated to the Companions of the Prophet ﷺ. It enumerates twenty-three Companions, beginning with Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and including Abu Hurayrah (noted as the most prolific memorizer among them), though al-Suyuti lists their names without providing biographical entries for them .
- The Second Class: The senior Successors ( kibar al-tabi'in ), comprising forty individuals with biographical entries .
- The Third Class: The intermediate Successors ( al-tabaqa al-wusta min al-tabi'in ), containing thirty biographees .
- The Fourth Class: The junior Successors ( sighar al-tabi'in ), containing fifty-five biographees .
The work proceeds through subsequent generations of hadith scholars in the same manner, concluding in the twenty-fourth class with the biography of Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani (d. 852 AH / 1449 CE) .
Publication History
Portions of the text were published in Göttingen in 1834 under the editorship of the German scholar Heinrich Ferdinand Wüstenfeld . In the Arab world, the complete work was edited by Ali Muhammad Umar and published in Cairo (1393 AH / 1973 CE), and it has also been issued in a single volume by Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya in Beirut (1403 AH / 1983 CE) .
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