Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Mizzi

Jamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf ibn al-Zakī ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Yūsuf ibn ʻAbd al-Malik ibn Yūsuf al-Kalbī al-Quḍā'ī al-Mizzī, , also called Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abī al-Ḥajjāj, was a Syrian muhaddith and the foremost `Ilm al-rijāl Islamic scholar.

Life Al-Mizzī was born near Aleppo in 1256 under the reign of the last Ayyubid emir An-Nasir Yusuf. From 1260, the region was ruled by the na'ib al-saltana (viceroys) of the Mamluk Sultanate. In childhood, he moved with his family to the village of al-Mizza outside Damascus, where he was educated in Qur'ān and fiqh. In his twenties he began his studies to become a muḥaddith and learned from the masters. His fellow pupil and life-long friend was Taqī al-Dīn ibn Taymiyya. It was also Ibn Taymiyya's ideological influence, which, although contrary to his own Shāfi'ī legalist inclination, that led to a stint in jail.

Despite his affiliation with Ibn Taymiyya, he became head of the Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Ashrafiyya, a leading ḥadīth academy in Damascus, in 1319. And although he professed the Ash'arī doctrine, suspicion continued about his true beliefs. He travelled across the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, Syria , and Ḥijāz and became the greatest `Ilm al-rijāl scholar of the Muslim world and an expert grammarian and philologist of Arabic. He died at Dar al-Hadith al-Ashrafiyya in Damascus in 1341/2 and was buried in the Sufiyya graveyard.

Pupils His students include the following:

Al-Dhahabī Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-ʿAlā'ī Ibn Kathīr Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī Ibn al-Furat Najm ad-Din al-Tufi

Works Tahdhīb al-Kamāl fī Asmā' al-Rijāl; biographical lexicon and comprehensive reworking of Al-Kamal fi Asma' al-Rijal, a collection of narrator biographies of the transmitters of isnāds in the Six major Hadith collections and others, based upon the tarf (beginning segment) of the hadith. The Tahdhīb includes Ruwāt kuttub al-sitta. Al-Asqalānī and others wrote compendia of this work. Tuḥfat al-Ashraf bi-Ma'rifat al-Aṭraf; alphabetically indexed encyclopaedia of the musnads of the first generation transmitters, the companions of Muhammad. An indispensable resource for the study of Muslim tradition that comprises al-Nasā'ī's Al-Sunan al-kubrā.