al-Hakim al-Naysaburi

Abu ʿAbd Allah Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Hakim al-Naysaburi, also known as Ibn al-Bayyiʿ, was a Sunni scholar of hadith (reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) from Nishapur, a great learning-city of Khurasan (the eastern Iranian world). Biographers place his birth in 321 AH / 933 CE and his death in 405 AH / 1014 CE, both in Nishapur. Like hadith specialists of his age he traveled widely to collect reports from teachers, reaching Iraq, the Hijaz (the region of Mecca and Medina), and Transoxiana (lands beyond the Oxus); among his teachers was the leading Baghdad critic al-Daraqutni. In law he followed the Shafiʿi school, and in theology he is usually counted among the Ashʿaris. His best-known book, al-Mustadrak ʿala al-Sahihayn ("the supplement to the two Sahihs"), gathered reports he judged to meet the standards of al-Bukhari and Muslim but absent from their collections; later hadith critics admired the project yet faulted many of its gradings as too lenient. He also wrote a pioneering manual on the sciences of hadith and a (now largely lost) History of Nishapur. Some later writers, among them al-Dhahabi, described him as inclining toward the partisans of ʿAli; others, such as al-Subki, rejected this as unfounded, counting him among the Ashʿaris. His student al-Bayhaqi became a major scholar in turn.