Tabaqat al-Sufiyya (al-Sulami)

Tabaqat al-Sufiyya ("The Generations of the Sufis") is the book of notices of the Sufi masters by Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami of Nishapur (d. 412 AH). ⁴ Its editor, Nur al-Din Shurayba, says that in the book's opening address and conclusion al-Sulami undertook to give five generations of twenty shaykhs each, with some sayings of each, but the text as we have it goes a little beyond that, in places treating two or three men under one heading, so that the notices number one hundred and three. ³ The editor says he cannot decide whether al-Sulami departed from his plan or his pupils added these notices, since all the manuscripts contain them. ³

The editor holds that al-Sulami wrote Haqa'iq al-Tafsir first, then Ta'rikh al-Sufiyya in the eighth decade of the fourth century — he mentions reading it at Rayy in 384 AH — and then Tabaqat al-Sufiyya at the close of the century, since in the notice of Abu Ja'far ibn Sinan he says news of the man's grandson's death reached him in 387 AH. ^{5 1}

• The first generation (from p. 76) begins with al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad, followed by Dhu al-Nun al-Misri, Ibrahim ibn Adham, Bishr al-Hafi, al-Harith al-Muhasibi, Shaqiq al-Balkhi, Abu Yazid al-Bistami, Abu Sulayman al-Darani, Ma'ruf al-Karkhi and others. ^{6 7 8}
• The second (from p. 224) begins with Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd and Abu al-Husayn al-Nuri, and includes Abu 'Uthman al-Hiri, 'Amr ibn 'Uthman al-Makki, Sahl al-Tustari and Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz. ^{9 10 11}
• The third (from p. 328) includes al-Jurayri, Ibn 'Ata' al-Adami, Ibrahim al-Khawwas, Bunan al-Hammal, Abu Bakr al-Wasiti, al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj and Khayr al-Nassaj. ^{9 12}
• The fourth (from p. 406) begins with Abu Bakr al-Shibli and includes al-Murta'ish, 'Abd Allah ibn Manazil and Abu al-Khayr al-Aqta'. ^{13 14}
• Then the fifth generation. ³

A notice gives name, lineage and town, then sayings with chains; thus the book opens with al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad al-Tamimi al-Yarbu'i, a Khurasani from the district of Marw, from a village called Fundin, on the authority of his companion Ibrahim ibn al-Ash'ath, followed by another report that he was born in Samarqand and grew up in Abiward. ^{8 15}

The editor says al-Sulami was not the first to write generations of Sufis and drew on books of which nothing survives: Tabaqat al-Nussak of Abu Sa'id ibn al-A'rabi (d. 341 AH), Akhbar al-Sufiyya wa-l-Zuhhad of his own teacher Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Dawud al-Zahid of Nishapur, and Ta'rikh al-Sufiyya of Abu al-'Abbas al-Nasawi (d. 396 AH). ¹ He says Abu Nu'aym in Hilyat al-Awliya' relied on al-Sulami's Tabaqat for almost all he wrote on the Sufis of the East; al-Khatib in Ta'rikh Baghdad gave no notice of a Sufi without quoting him; his pupil al-Qushayri often follows his order in the Risala; and later Jami continued it in Nafahat al-Uns and al-Sha'rani followed it in Lawaqih al-Anwar. ² He notes that the Paris library holds a manuscript with the book's transmission from al-Sulami through his pupil Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn 'Ali ibn Khalaf al-Shirazi. ¹⁶

The editor relates that in February 1951 he wrote to Professor Johannes Pedersen of Copenhagen University to ask whether he meant to finish the edition he had begun in 1938; Pedersen did not answer himself, but one of his students did. ^{16 17} He took as his base the manuscript of the Quwala library, for its margins collated with many copies and quotations from lost books, and because it had belonged to the library of Muhammad 'Ali, governor of Egypt; he marked variant readings by line number rather than with numbers in the text. ³ The edition used here is the third (Maktabat al-Khanji, 1406 AH / 1986), of which the collection holds two scans. ¹⁸