Shams al-Din Ibn Tulun

Shams al-Din Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad, known as Ibn Tulun, of Damascus and the Salihiyya quarter, a Hanafi, a learned imam, a transmitter of hadith and a historian. He was born in the upper quarter of Salihiyya in Damascus, near the Hajibiyya madrasa, around the year 880. He heard and read hadith with a number of scholars, including the judge Nasir al-Din ibn Zurayq, al-Siraj ibn al-Sayrafi, al-Jamal ibn al-Mubarrad, Shaykh Abu al-Fath al-Mizzi and Ibn al-Nu'aymi. He studied jurisprudence with his uncle, al-Jamal Ibn Tulun, and others, and he took a licence from al-Suyuti by correspondence ².

He was skilled in grammar, a scholar of jurisprudence and well known for hadith. He held the post of teacher of Hanafi law at the madrasa of Shaykh al-Islam Abu Umar and was imam of the Sulaymaniyya mosque in Salihiyya. Students came to him to study grammar, and people were eager to hear him. His days were full of teaching, instruction and writing. He copied out many books by hand, and he compiled sixty volumes of notes called "The Annotations", each containing many works, most of them collected by him, including much of the writing of his teacher al-Suyuti. He had a wide command of most of the well-known sciences, including rhetoric and medicine ¹.

Several notables studied with him and excelled in his lifetime. They included al-Shihab al-Tibi, the shaykh of preachers and hadith scholars; al-Ala ibn Imad al-Din; al-Najm al-Bahnasi, the preacher of Damascus; and, later, Shaykh Ismail al-Nabulsi, the mufti of the Shafiis; al-Zayn ibn Sultan, the mufti of the Hanafis; al-Shihab al-Aynawi, the mufti of the Shafiis; al-Shihab ibn Abi al-Wafa, the mufti of the Hanbalis; and the judge Akmal ibn Muflih. He died on Sunday, the eleventh of Jumada al-Ula, and was buried in their family tomb beside his paternal uncle, the judge Jamal al-Din, at the foot of the mountain, south of the Cave and the Khwarazmiyya. He left no descendants ³.