Ubayy ibn Ka'b
?–649 CE · Medina
Ubayy ibn Ka'b was a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad from Medina, a member of the Banu Khazraj clan of the Ansar ("helpers," the Medinan Muslims who hosted the early community). Tradition holds that he embraced Islam at the second Pledge of al-Aqaba, the agreement struck near Mecca by which Medinan delegates invited the Prophet to their city. He is reported to have served as a scribe who wrote down revelation and letters, and later sources count him among the first Ansari secretaries.
His lasting fame is as a reciter of the Qur'an. Hadith reports praise him as foremost among reciters, and the honorific "Sayyid al-Qurra" (master of the reciters) is attached to his name in the tradition. He is said to have kept his own written collection (mushaf) of the Qur'an; scholarly tradition records that it differed in some arrangement from the later standard codex. Several of the canonical "readings" of the Qur'an are traced back, in part, to his recitation.
What happened after the Prophet's death is genuinely uncertain. One body of reports places him on the commission that produced the standardized codex under the caliph Uthman; another holds that he died earlier, under the caliph Umar. His reported death year ranges widely across the sources — 19, 22, 30, and other dates appear — so any single figure should be read as an estimate. He is traditionally said to have died in Medina and been buried in its al-Baqi cemetery.
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Medina
What they did here
Ubayy was a Medinan of the Ansar (Banu Khazraj). His documented life unfolds in Medina, where he is reported to have written down revelation, became renowned as a Qur'an reciter, and (in the dominant tradition) is said to have died and been buried in the al-Baqi cemetery. He is reported to have accepted Islam at the second Pledge of al-Aqaba, an event that took place near Mecca during the pilgrimage season; the sources do not describe him residing in Mecca, so it is not given as a separate life-stop. The death year is disputed (19, 22, 30 AH and others reported), and even whether he died under Umar or Uthman is contested.
About Medina
Medina (al-Madina, formerly Yathrib), in the Hejaz of western Saudi Arabia, is the city to which the Prophet Muhammad emigrated in 622 (the hijra), establishing the first Muslim community; it contains his tomb and is Islam's second-holiest city. As the cradle of early Islamic law and hadith scholarship it remained a major centre of learning that drew the scholars connected here.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ubayy ibn Ka'b’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works
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