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Kufa
What they did here
Al-Sha'bi was born, raised, educated, served as a judge (qadi), and died in Kufa, the Iraqi garrison city to which his Hamdani clan had migrated. Classical biography places nearly his whole life here. Both ends of his life are traditional estimates: his birth is variously placed c. 16-21 AH (c. 637-642 CE) and his death year is variously reported as 103-110 AH (c. 721-729 CE).
About Kufa
Kufa, on the Euphrates in central Iraq near Najaf, was a garrison-town (misr) founded by the Muslims around 638 during the conquest of Iraq. It became a major centre of early Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, and Shi'i scholarship, and for a time the capital of the caliph Ali; the traditionist Ibn Abi Shayba (d. 849) and the Twelver scholar Ibn Babawayh al-Saduq (d. 991) are among those connected to it.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Sha'bi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Jewish world
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Works
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