Badreddin al-Hasani

Muhammad Badr al-Din ibn Yusuf al-Hasani (1850–1935) was a Syrian scholar of Moroccan origin, celebrated as al-Muhaddith al-Akbar — "the greatest hadith scholar" — and as shaykh of the shaykhs of Syria. He was born at Damascus in 1267 AH / 1850 CE, in a house adjoining the Ashrafiyya Dar al-Hadith, to a father from a Marrakesh family of scholars and a mother from the Kuzbari family, itself a family of hadith masters. His father died when he was twelve; he completed his studies at the Dar al-Hadith under teachers among whom Abu al-Khayr al-Khatib is named, memorised the two Sahihs of al-Bukhari and Muslim with their chains, and is said to have memorised twenty thousand verses of the classical textbooks. Before he was thirty he had written more than forty works; the TDV encyclopedia notes that many of them perished in a fire in his quarter. His son Taj al-Din al-Hasani became president of Syria under the French Mandate. No English or Urdu Wikipedia article on him exists; this page rests on the Arabic article, the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry, the Odabasham biography and a modern academic study of Damascus's Sufi networks. ^{1 2 3}

His public lessons became a Damascus institution: on Fridays after prayer he taught a single hadith in the Umayyad Mosque until the call to afternoon prayer, ranging across law, theology, language, medicine and mathematics, and his room at the Dar al-Hadith drew students for the rest of the week. Ali al-Tantawi, who attended him, left a famous obituary. The TDV entry records two episodes of his public life: during the First World War, when some Damascenes asked him to lead a revolt against the Ottoman government and be proclaimed caliph, he refused openly and withdrew further from people; under the French occupation, by contrast, he toured the towns preaching in support of the fighters. He died at Damascus in 1354 AH / 1935 CE and was buried in Bab al-Saghir cemetery, in a funeral the city turned out for. ^{1 2 3}

The Arabic biographical tradition is unusually explicit about him. The Arabic article's lead calls him "Shafi'i in school, Ash'ari in creed, a Sufi of the Shadhili path", and its section on his school quotes the story — taken from al-Zirikli's al-A'lam — of a journey on which he refused to shorten his prayers, telling his students: "I am a Shafi'i, and in the school of my imam Abu Abd Allah al-Shafi'i the journey in which prayer is shortened is a journey of obedience, not of disobedience" — and he counted his own journey, made while still in debt, as no journey of obedience. The Odabasham biography states the same plainly: "his school — he was Shafi'i in school, like his father." His data record accordingly gives sunni-shafii, documented, and a second segment sufi, documented; one modern academic article, Takao's study of the Kuftaru genealogy, describes him instead as a scholar "of the Maliki School and a member of the Qadiri Sufi order". The two traditions agree that he held a Sufi affiliation personally and disagree on both the order and the school; the record preserves both readings in full. ^{1 3 4}

The Arabic article and the Odabasham biography date his death to Friday 27 Rabi' al-Awwal 1354 AH, which corresponds to 28 June 1935. The TDV encyclopedia entry gives 13 August 1935 instead. The data record carries the Arabic tradition's date and marks it debated, with the conflict stated in the note. ^{1 3 2}