General · EdgepediaOctober 10, 20265 min read

Ibn al-Akhram (hadith hafiz of Isfahan, d. 301 AH)

Ibn al-Akhram (ابن الأخرم) is the biographical name of Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn al-Abbas ibn Ayyub al-Asbahani, a hadith transmitter and hadith memorizer (hafiz) of Isfahan whom the classical biographers title a great imam, hafiz of athar, and jurist (faqih) who traveled to collect hadith.¹ His record is thin and unstable: modern databases conflate him with two later homonyms who share the name, and the digitized biographical sources give his death year as 301 AH (913–914 CE).¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Identity	Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn al-Abbas ibn Ayyub al-Asbahani; titled al-Imam al-Kabir, al-Hafiz, al-Athari, faqih¹
Teachers	Abu Kurayb, al-Mufaddal ibn Ghassan al-Ghalabi, Ziyad ibn Yahya al-Hasani, Ali ibn Harb, Ammar ibn Khalid; per Ibn Naqta also Abd al-Wahhab ibn al-Hakam al-Warraq and al-Hasan ibn 'Arafa¹^•³
Students	Abu Ahmad al-Assal, Abu al-Shaykh, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim ibn Afrija, Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Umar; al-Tabarani narrated from him²^•³
Reliability	Suyuti's Tabaqat al-huffaz calls him thiqa (reliable) and a hadith memorizer⁴
Death year	Digitised as 301 AH in al-Dhahabi's Siyar and in Suyuti's Tabaqat al-huffaz¹^•²^•⁴
Homonyms	At least three scholars called Ibn al-Akhram: the Isbahani, the Nishapuri Muhammad ibn Ya'qub al-Shaybani (250–344 AH), and a Damascene Quran reader (d. 341 AH)⁵^•⁶
Classical notices	Tarikh Isbahan 2/224, Tadhkirat al-Huffaz 2/747, al-'Ibar 2/120, Siyar A'lam al-Nubala 14/144³

Name, identity, and the homonym problem

The name "Ibn al-Akhram" does not identify one man. A third homonym appears in al-Dhahabi's Siyar A'lam al-Nubala: Ibn al-Akhram the Quran reader (muqri) of Damascus, Abu al-Hasan Muhammad ibn al-Nadr al-Raba'i, a student of Harun al-Akhfash, who died in 341 AH at the age of eighty-one.⁶

The conflation is measurable. Modern hadith databases attach the name primarily to the Nishapuri: hadith.dev lists Muhammad ibn Ya'qub Ibn al-Akhram al-Shaybani (born 250 AH, died 344 AH, known anciently as Ibn al-Kirmani) with 1,428 hadiths and 1,849 isnads, and the Musawwat Tarajim al-Hadith database catalogs 1,660 narrations for him traced into Sunan al-Bayhaqi al-Kubra and al-Mustadrak ala al-Sahihayn.⁷^•⁵

Teachers, students, and transmission

Al-Dhahabi's entry, reproduced in the Hadith Transmitters Encyclopedia, states that Ibn al-Akhram traveled (irtahala) in search of hadith and took material from Abu Kurayb, al-Mufaddal ibn Ghassan al-Ghalabi, Ziyad ibn Yahya al-Hasani, Ali ibn Harb, and Ammar ibn Khalid, among others.¹ Ibn Naqta adds two further teachers, Abd al-Wahhab ibn al-Hakam al-Warraq and al-Hasan ibn 'Arafa, and records that al-Tabarani narrated from him.³

His students carried his material forward: Abu Ahmad al-Assal, Abu al-Shaykh, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim ibn Afrija, and Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Umar.² Suyuti lists the same teachers and students in his Tabaqat al-huffaz entry.⁴

Verdicts of the critics and his creed

Suyuti's verdict is thiqa, reliable, and he calls him a muhaddith and hafiz.⁴ Al-Dhahabi's titles are stronger than a bare tawthiq: he calls him al-Imam al-Kabir (the great imam), al-Hafiz, al-Athari, and faqih.¹

Al-Dhahabi also preserves a testament of his, mostly on the creed of the salaf, in which Ibn al-Akhram stated that whoever claims the wording (lafz) of the Quran is created is a disbeliever. Al-Dhahabi comments that he apparently meant by lafz the thing uttered (malfuz), not the act of uttering (talfuz).¹^•²

The death-date problem: 131 or 301 AH

The Hawramani transcription of al-Dhahabi's entry gives his death year as 301 AH.¹ The Islamweb edition of the same Siyar passage, and Suyuti's Tabaqat al-huffaz, both give 301 AH (sana ihda wa-thalami'a, three hundred and one), and the Islamweb text places him in al-Dhahabi's seventeenth tabaqa, a generation consistent with 301 rather than 131.²^•⁴

A hypothetical 131 AH date would place his death in the year of the Abbasid revolution in his own city: Qahtaba ibn Shabib won a victory over a large Umayyad force at Isfahan in Rajab 131 (February–March 749), capturing much booty, and Kufa fell to the Abbasids later that year.⁸ The 301 AH date would instead make him a near-contemporary of the Isfahani hadith scholar Muhammad ibn Ja'far of the Ibn Manda family, whom Abu Nu'aym's notices date to 301/913–914.⁹ The cited biographical entries give his death year as 301 AH.

Isfahan as a hadith center

Isfahan sustained a documented hadith milieu across the early centuries. The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three describes the Ibn Manda family of Isfahan as a famous dynasty of hadith scholars and historians active for nearly three centuries.⁹ A peer-reviewed study from the University of Isfahan documents scholarly communication between the muhaddiths of Isfahan and those of Nishapur from the 3rd to the 7th century AH.¹⁰ Ibn al-Akhram's recorded career fits this pattern: a traveling collector whose students, including Abu al-Shaykh, carried his material forward, and whose narrations reached al-Tabarani.³

References

Initially written Oct 10, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026