Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri

Abu Amr Uthman ibn Abd al-Rahman, known as Ibn al-Salah al-Shahrazuri, was a Sunni scholar of the Shafi'i school of law (madhhab) remembered above all as a master of the hadith sciences — the discipline that studies the reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds and grades their reliability. He was born around 577 AH (1181 CE) in or near Shahrazur, a Kurdish district in what is now northern Iraq, and first studied jurisprudence (fiqh) with his father. He then pursued learning across the great centres of the age, including Mosul and, further east, the scholarly hub of Nishapur in Khurasan, before teaching in the Levant.

His lasting fame rests on the Muqaddima (also called Ulum al-Hadith or Ma'rifat anwa' ilm al-hadith), an "introduction to the science of hadith." Composed while he led a specialist hadith college in Damascus, it organised the terminology and methods of the field so authoritatively that later scholars referred to the genre simply as "the book of Ibn al-Salah" and wrote commentaries and versifications of it for centuries.

In matters of law he was a Shafi'i; biographers also describe him as following the Ash'ari school in theology, and report that he opposed the study of philosophy (falsafa) — a stance later writers cite both approvingly and critically. He died in Damascus in 643 AH (1245 CE) and was buried there.