Saints and Tombs of Samarkand

Scholar

Imam al-Bukhari

The great hadith scholar known for al-Jami' al-sahih , regarded as the most reliable book after the Qur'an (d. 256/870). His full name was Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad b. Isma'il b. Ibrahim al-Ju'fi al-Bukhari . He was born at Bukhara on Friday 13 Shawwal 194 (20 July 810). His great-great-grandfather Bardizbah was a Zoroastrian; because the latter's son al-Mughira became a Muslim through the governor of Bukhara, Yaman al-Ju'fi, al-Bukhari is also known by the nisba al-Ju'fi. His father Isma'il had learned hadith from scholars such as Malik b. Anas and 'Abd Allah b. al-Mubarak; he died while al-Bukhari was still a child, and some of his hadith books passed to his son. His mother is mentioned as a pious woman whose prayers were answered. Around the age of ten he began to learn hadith from Bukharan traditionists such as Muhammad b. Salam al-Bikandi and 'Abd Allah b. Muhammad al-Musnadi. At about eleven he drew attention by correcting some errors made by his teacher al-Dakhili while transmitting; by sixteen he had entirely memorized the books of Ibn al-Mubarak and Waki' b. al-Jarrah. At that time he went on pilgrimage with his mother and his brother Ahmad; while they returned home he stayed in Mecca and studied hadith with scholars such as Khallad b. Yahya and 'Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr al-Humaydi. Then he began to travel among the centres of learning: he went to Baghdad more than eight times, meeting Ahmad b. Hanbal on each visit; he went to Basra four or five times and to Balkh several times, where at the request of its people he dictated one hadith from each of the 1000 teachers from whom he had learned. He learned hadith from Abu Mushir in Damascus, stayed six years in the Hijaz, went to Hims, travelled many times to Kufa, and also studied in Medina, Merv and Egypt, which he visited twice. In Nishapur, which he visited first in 209 (824) and last in 250 (864), he taught hadith for five years. He says that the number of scholars from whom he wrote hadith was 1080; a treatise by Ibn Manda gives the names of 309 of his teachers from whom he transmits in al-Jami' al-sahih . From the hadiths gathered on his long journeys he built up a large library; he said that one night, staying awake, he reckoned up the hadiths he had written until then and found he had recorded 200,000 hadiths with continuous chains. The most famous example of the strength of his memory is the Baghdad test reported by Ibn 'Adi: the traditionists mixed up the chains and texts of 100 hadiths, gave them to ten men, and these asked al-Bukhari about them in turn. Al-Bukhari said that he knew none of the hadiths in the form in which they had been read, and then, beginning with the first questioner, told each of them the correct chain and text of the hadith he had asked about. He too suffered from the controversy, long continuing in the Islamic world, over whether the Qur'an is created. When he came to Nishapur the people and the traditionist Muhammad b. Yahya al-Dhuhli received him with great honour; but when he was asked whether the Qur'an is created, his answer caused a great dispute among those present. Faced with al-Dhuhli's influence in the city, he recited the verse "I commit my affair to God; surely God sees His servants" (al-Mu'min 40/44), said that he had not come to Nishapur for any gain, and left the city the next day. He went on to Merv and from there to Bukhara. He withheld his knowledge from no one who sought it, but kept away from men of state and regarded going to their palaces as demeaning to learning. When the governor of Khurasan, Khalid b. Ahmad al-Dhuhli, let him know that he wished to hear his works from him, he replied that he could not carry learning to other people's doors, and that if the governor wished he should come to the mosque where he taught or to his house; he also refused the governor's request to teach only his own children, on the ground that he could not reserve learning for particular people. Thereupon the governor had men close to him allege that he held views incompatible with the Sunna, and exiled him from his homeland. Al-Bukhari set out for Samarqand; while visiting relatives in the small town of Khartank , 3 miles from Samarqand, he fell ill and could not reach Samarqand. He died on the eve of the Feast of Breaking the Fast of the year 256 and was buried there the next day (Friday 1 September 870). All that is known of his family is that he had a son named Ahmad. He was of medium height, thin and slight of build; he spoke little, did not covet what others possessed and paid no attention to food and drink. Many of his actions are reported to show his generosity and his indifference to worldly goods: to those who advised him to collect through officials a debt long unpaid, he said, "If I ask them for help, they will ask me to give fatwas as it suits them; I cannot sell my religion for the world." Even of the narrators he criticized he spoke with great moderation and fairness, and used to say, "I hope that God Most High will not call me to account for backbiting." He loved archery. His Circle of Influence — His famous pupil al-Firabri says that 90,000 people heard al-Jami' al-sahih from al-Bukhari. His other best-known pupils are Imam Muslim , al-Tirmidhi , Abu Hatim, Abu Zur'a al-Razi, Muhammad b. Nasr al-Marwazi, Salih Jazara and Ibn Khuzayma. His teachers and contemporaries spoke of him with praise: Nu'aym b. Hammad and Ya'qub b. Ibrahim al-Dawraqi used to say, "Al-Bukhari is the jurist of this community"; Ishaq b. Rahawayh advised the traditionists, "Write hadith from this young man"; Imam Muslim told him, "I bear witness that there is none like you in the world"; and Ibn Khuzayma said he had seen no one under the vault of heaven who knew the hadiths of the Messenger of God better. Because he was the first to bring the sound hadiths together and because of his superiority in detecting subtle defects ( 'ilal ), he has been accepted as an undisputed authority in the science of hadith. In creed he is counted among the first Sunni scholars who contributed to the formation of the Ahl al-Sunna; his view that the recitation of the Qur'an is created paved the way for the later Sunni theological distinction between "verbal speech" ( kalam lafzi ) and "inner speech" ( kalam nafsi ), and his contemporaries Muslim and Ibn Qutayba adopted this view. His Poetry and Sufi Line — It is recorded that the moral verses found in some books reflect his taste for poetry. In his scholarly line he was, in general terms, attached to the creed of the Salaf, and he criticized the Jahmiyya, the Mu'tazila, the Khawarij and the Shi'a. While most hadith scholars regarded the discussion of doctrinal questions as innovation, he held such discussion necessary when beliefs contrary to the texts arose, so that the view conforming to the Qur'an and Sunna could be established and defended. For him the Qur'an is the speech of God and is not created, while reading and writing the Qur'an are acts of the servants and are created. On the attribute of bringing into being, on not declaring grave sinners unbelievers, and on faith and Islam being the same thing he followed Abu Hanifa; on faith increasing and decreasing he followed Ahmad b. Hanbal. He is also known as a great jurist; because the chapter headings in al-Jami' al-sahih reflect his legal views it has been said, "Al-Bukhari's jurisprudence is in his chapter headings." His Works — ① al-Jami' al-sahih : known popularly as Sahih al-Bukhari ; he said that he produced it in sixteen years, selecting from some 600,000 hadiths, and that before writing each hadith he performed the full ablution and prayed two cycles. He began writing it in Bukhara and continued in Mecca, Medina and Basra; hundreds of studies and commentaries have been written on it. ② al-Tarikh al-kabir : begun before he was twenty and, in his own words, "by the Prophet's grave on moonlit nights", it establishes the degree of reliability of nearly 13,000 narrators; he kept renewing and completing it until a late stage of his life. ③ al-Tarikh al-awsat and ④ al-Tarikh al-saghir : abridgements and summaries of the great history. ⑤ Kitab al-du'afa' al-saghir : it contains 418 narrators. ⑥ Kitab al-kuna . ⑦ al-Adab al-mufrad : it gathers hadiths on good character, 1322 hadiths in 644 chapters. ⑧ Khalq af'al al-'ibad : written to show that the servants' utterance of the Qur'an, like their other acts, is created. ⑨ Raf' al-yadayn fi al-salat and ⑩ Kitab al-qira'a khalf al-imam . The source also lists other works whose names appear in his writings and in the sources, such as al-'Aqida (al-Tawhid) , al-Tafsir al-kabir and Birr al-walidayn . His statement that he wrote all his books three times shows that he read them to his students and revised them each time.

SemerkantDied 256 AHView

Scholar

Abu Mansur al-Maturidi

The imam after whom the Maturidiyya , one of the two great schools of Sunni theology, is named; Qur'an commentator and Hanafi jurist. His full name is Abu Mansur Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Mahmud al-Maturidi al-Samarqandi . His followers called him by such titles as imam al-huda , 'alam al-huda , ra'is mashayikh Samarqand , imam al-mutakallimin and imam Ahl al-Sunna . Maturid, from which he takes his name, is an outer quarter of Samarqand, today within the borders of Uzbekistan; Barthold, who visited the city in 1920, describes it as a village to the north-west of the town. The sources contain very little on his life. His date of birth is not known with certainty; from the information that his teacher, the qadi of Rayy Muhammad b. Muqatil al-Razi, died in 248 (862), it is estimated that he was born about the middle of the first half of the III (IX) century and lived close to a hundred years. He lived in the age when the central authority of the Abbasids had weakened and the Samanids ruled Transoxiana. Of his family nothing is known beyond the names of his father and grandfather (Muhammad b. Mahmud). The source states that the language and style of his works point to an author whose mother tongue was not Arabic, that his sentence structures conform to Turkish grammar, and that, given the Turkish majority of the region in which he lived, he must be said to have been of Turkish origin. He belongs to the fourth, even the third, generation of Hanafi scholars. He studied under teachers such as Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Ishaq al-Juzjani, Nusayr b. Yahya al-Balkhi and the qadi of Nishapur Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Juzjani, and completed his education with Abu Nasr al-'Iyadi , who taught at the Dar al-Juzjaniyya and headed the scholars of Samarqand. Nothing is known of his schooling, his travels, whether he made the pilgrimage or held any official post. His view that whoever calls the manifestly tyrannical sultan of the day "just" falls into unbelief, and his censure of Abu al-Qasim al-Ka'bi for his relations with tyrannical statesmen, show that his relations with the politicians of his time were not good. He is known for his work in theology, exegesis, law and the history of sects. The titles of his books give the impression of long struggles against the ideas put forward by sects such as the Mu'tazila, the Qarmatians and the Rafida. The source records that he began to be active in this field before Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, his contemporary, though no record exists of their meeting, and that together with his scholarly circle he played an important part in the stabilisation of Islamic thought in Transoxiana and in the spread of Islam and Hanafism among the Turks. That he was neglected for nearly two centuries even in his own homeland, and that, living far from the seat of the caliphate and at odds with political power, he did not enjoy state patronage as the Ash'aris did, are among the points the source notes. Abu al-Mu'in al-Nasafi and Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari record, without giving a date, that he died shortly after al-Ash'ari (d. 324/935-36); al-Qurashi, on the authority of two of his teachers, states that he died in 333 (944) , and scholars such as al-Firuzabadi, Ibn Qutlubugha, al-Kafawi, al-Zabidi and al-Laknawi adopt the same date. He was buried in the famous Chakardiza cemetery of Samarqand. His friend al-Hakim al-Samarqandi had an inscription to this effect placed on his gravestone: "This is the grave of one who devoted his whole life to knowledge, spent his strength in spreading and teaching it, whose works in the way of religion are remembered with praise, and who gathered the fruits of his life." His own remark that the kunya Abu Mansur may be given to a childless man in the hope of a son named Mansur may, according to the source, be a sign that he had no male offspring. His line continued through a daughter: the paternal grandmother of the qadi of Samarqand Abu al-Hasan 'Ali b. Hasan al-Maturidi (d. 511/1117) was his daughter's daughter; this qadi and his father were buried near the grave of their ancestor al-Maturidi. His Circle of Influence — Abu Ahmad al-'Iyadi, Abu al-Hasan 'Ali b. Sa'id al-Rustughfani and Abu Muhammad 'Abd al-Karim b. Musa al-Bazdawi studied law and theology under him. Ibn Yahya, the pupil of his pupil, describes him as "unique in his time in knowledge, understanding, mastery of the schools and piety." The same Ibn Yahya says that in his own day the Sunnis of Samarqand were known as Juzjaniyya and 'Iyadiyya and makes no mention of a Maturidiyya; the source takes this as a sign that in the second half of the IV (X) century the school was not yet attributed to him. Even Abu al-Yusr al-Bazdawi (d. 493/1100) found the Kitab al-Tawhid problematic in language and style and criticised some of its views. With Abu al-Mu'in al-Nasafi , who embraced him as the founder of a school and wrote the Tabsirat al-adilla , Maturidism took its place in history as a theological movement. According to Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari the name "Maturidiyya" was coined by Mu'tazili theologians angered by the strong support he gave to the Sunnis. Al-Taftazani records that the Ash'ariyya prevailed in Khurasan, Iraq and Syria and the Maturidiyya in Transoxiana, and that although they differed on questions such as takwin and the exception in faith, the scholars of the two groups did not accuse one another of heresy. Ash'arism spread among the Shafi'is and Malikis, Maturidism among the Hanafis. His Poetry and Sufi Line — He was not a poet; this section carries his scholarly and Sufi line. According to the theological section of the source, if one proceeds from the works that survive, al-Maturidi must be counted the founder of Sunni theology: the Kitab al-Tawhid is the first work to contain systematically the three foundations (divinity, prophethood, the hereafter) that form the main plan of later Sunni theological works. On the necessity of religion he holds reason and transmission to be two indispensable sources of knowledge; for reaching the reality of things and events he recognises three means, sense perception ( 'iyan ), report and inference, and he grants no epistemological value to unsystematic methods such as inspiration, lot-casting or judging from facial features. He criticises the Jabriyya, who deny man freedom of will, and the Mu'tazila, who limit the divine power; the section he devotes to predestination exceeds a quarter of the book. There are also records of his Sufi side: al-Nasafi's calling him qudwat al-fariqayn (leader of the two groups) evokes a leading position in both the outer and the inner sciences, and his explanations of the ways to piety bear a markedly Sufi character. At the same time he states plainly in the Kitab al-Tawhid that unveiling and inspiration cannot be sources of knowledge; as reported from his pupil al-Rustughfani, he rejected the view of those who held the saints superior to the prophets, and objected to those who frowned on enjoying the blessings of this world, saying that they were created for man. His Works — Of the thirteen works whose attribution to him is certain, Abu al-Mu'in al-Nasafi records the names of twelve. Exegesis: Ta'wilat al-Qur'an ( Ta'wilat Ahl al-Sunna ) — composed of his dictations to his pupils; rich also in theology, law and legal theory, some forty manuscripts are known. Theology: Kitab al-Tawhid (his only work printed in full), Kitab al-Maqalat , against al-Ka'bi the Radd Awa'il al-adilla , Radd Tahdhib al-jadal and Radd Wa'id al-fussaq , Bayan wahm al-Mu'tazila , Radd al-Usul al-khamsa (against Abu 'Umar al-Bahili), Radd Kitab al-Imama (against one of the Rafida), al-Radd 'ala al-Qaramita . Law: Ma'akhidh al-shara'i' fi usul al-fiqh , Kitab al-Jadal fi usul al-fiqh , al-Radd 'ala al-Qaramita on positive law, and Sharh al-Jami' al-saghir . The source notes that the Sharh al-Fiqh al-akbar attributed to him in fact belongs to Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandi, and that the attribution of the Risala fi al-'aqa'id , the Persian Pandnama and similar treatises is also problematic. His Tomb and Complex — Barthold records that on his journey to Samarqand in 1920 he saw al-Maturidi's tomb in the Chakardiza cemetery. In the Soviet period the cemetery was opened to housing and the site of the tomb was left in the garden of a house; a group of Turkish scholars who visited the city in 1991 stated that there was no tomb there and that the grave had been concreted over and used as a courtyard. On the site of the grave, today in Gujduvan street in the Ikkinchi Sharq quarter of the central Siyab district of Samarqand, a new tomb completed in 2000 was built, with a complex around it. By decision of the Council of Ministers of Uzbekistan his 1130th birth anniversary was celebrated the same year with great events; on 17 November 2000 an international symposium was held on the occasion of the opening of the tomb.

SemerkantDied 333 AHView

Saints and Tombs of Samarkand

Map of Samarkand

Records in Samarkand

Ubaydullah Ahrar

Darwish Muhammad

Imam al-Bukhari

Nearby cities

Abu Mansur al-Maturidi

Qutham ibn Abbas (Shah-i-Zinda)

Sheikh Burhan al-Din Sagarji