Ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi
?–978 CE · Qom
Abu al-Qasim Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi was a Twelver Shia traditionist (a collector and transmitter of hadith, reported sayings and deeds of the Prophet and the Imams) active in the tenth century CE. He belonged to a Qom family already known for hadith scholarship: he is reported to have studied first under his father, Muhammad, and his brother, Ali, both remembered as traditionists. Qom, in present-day Iran, was then a leading center of Shia learning.
Tradition holds that he later traveled in search of hadith, and his death in Iraq is well attested; some accounts also report travel to Egypt, though this is less certain. He is best known for Kamil al-Ziyarat ("The Complete [Book] of Visitations"), a collection of roughly 843 reports on ziyara — the practice of visiting and venerating the graves of the Prophet and the Imams. Within Twelver Shia tradition the book is highly esteemed.
Twelver biographers such as al-Najashi and al-Tusi grade him thiqa ("reliable") as a transmitter. He is widely described as a teacher of al-Shaykh al-Mufid, a foundational Twelver theologian, in jurisprudence. Some modern Shia sources also count the great traditionist al-Kulayni (compiler of al-Kafi) among his teachers; given al-Kulayni's death around 329 AH this direct link is debated and is best treated as a claim of the tradition rather than settled fact. He is reported to have died in Baghdad and to have been buried at the al-Kazimiyya shrine.
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Qom
What they did here
Ibn Qulawayh is consistently identified as al-Qummi, from Qom, where his family of Shia traditionists was based and where he is reported to have begun his hadith studies under his father Muhammad and brother Ali. (One outlier reading, in the English Wikipedia, gives Baghdad as his birthplace; the nisba and the Qom family tradition favor Qom.)
About Qom
Qom, in north-central Iran, became an early centre of Twelver Shi'i scholarship and is the site of the shrine of Fatima al-Ma'suma, sister of the imam Ali al-Rida. The traditionist Ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi (d. 978) and the early hadith collectors of the Qummi school were based there; the scholar Ibn Babawayh al-Saduq (d. 991) also took the nisba al-Qummi.
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