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Ibn Hisham
Ibn Hisham
?–833 CE · Basra
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām (d. 218 AH / 833 CE), commonly known as Ibn Hisham, was a Sunni Muslim scholar of South Arabian (Himyari) descent who grew up in Basra and later settled in Fustat, Egypt, where he was known as a grammarian and historian. He is best known for his edited recension of Ibn Isḥāq's biography of the Prophet Muhammad, transmitted through al-Bakkāʾī, which survives as al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya and is the earliest substantially complete prophetic biography to come down to us; in editing it he abridged material, omitted reports and poetry he considered weak or inappropriate, and added philological notes. He also compiled Kitāb al-Tījān fī mulūk Ḥimyar, a work on the legends and genealogies of the pre-Islamic kings of South Arabia. His birth year is not recorded in the sources.
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BasraבצרהSouthern Iraq — Persian Gulf port
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Basra
Basra hosted one of the oldest Babylonian-Jewish communities, with continuous residence from the Talmudic era until the mid-20th century. R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad (Ben Ish Hai) maintained extensive correspondence with the Basra rabbinic court.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn Hisham’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.