Ibn Bashkuwāl, he was Khalaf ibn ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Mas'ud ibn Musa ibn Bashkuwāl ibn Yûsuf al-Ansârī, Abū'l-Qāsim,, was an influential Andalusiantraditionist and biographer working in Córdoba and Seville.
Life
His ancestry was Arab and was a descendant of al-Ansar- he was known as Ibn Bashkuwāl in the Valencia region. His first teacher was his father, to whom he dedicates a section in his biographical work. He studied with the most famous scholars of his time: Ibn al-'Arabī al-Ma'āfirī and the lawyer Abūl-Walīd ibn Ruschd, the grandfather of the philosopher Averroës. In his hometown he worked as a consulting lawyer and for a short time as deputy Qādī in Seville under Ibn al-'Arabī. It appears he never travelled to the East and his scholarship derived from the Andalusian-Islamic tradition. His biographer Ibn Abbār mentions 41 scholars in Córdoba and Seville, with whom he studied. His library held works by authors from the Islamic East; of which is the K. as-Siyar from Abū Ishāq al-Fazārī, on whose title page he is documented as the owner of the work. He died in January 1183 and was buried in the cemetery known then as Ibn 'Abbās Scholars’ Cemetery in Córdoba
Works
Ibn Bashkuwāl's biographers attribute him authorship of twenty-six known books, treatises and monographs of biographical content, and list his teachers and the texts he studied. Among his few surviving works are:
Aṣ-ṣila fī ta'rīḫ a'immat al-Andalus, ‘Continuation of the scholarly history of al-Andalus’; continuation of Ibn al-Faraḍī's famous biographical dictionary of Islamic Spain's scholars, which contains 1541 biographies of 11th and 12th century Andalusian scholars. In a dedicated chapter he presents the life of the so-called "strangers", who came to al-Andalus from the Orient and Ifrīqiya.
* Ibn al-Abbār from Valencia wrote the supplement and filled some gaps found in the original work. In the first volume he wrote a detailed biography of Ibn Baškuwāl.
* Another supplement and continuation of Ibn Baškuwāl's work was written by Ibn az-Zubair al-Gharnāṭī – 1309, Granada ) entitled ilat aṣ-ṣila or: 'The story of the scholars of al-Andalus, in which he of the Kitāb aṣ-ṣila continued by Ibn Baškuwāl'. This book deals with the Andalusian scholars of the 12th and 13th centuries. A fragment of the work was published by the French orientalist Évariste Lévi-Provençal in 1937. Three further volumes with corrections and additions to the first edition were published in 1993.
Kitāb ġawāmiḍ al-asmā' al-mubhama al-wāqi'a fī-'l-aḥādīṯ al-musnada, ‘Secrets of indistinct names found in Hadiths with complete Isnads’; two-volume biographical compilation and explanation of personal names, names of ancestry contradictorily, or incorrectly, reported in the literature.
Shuyūḥ'Abd Allāh ibn Wahb al-Qurashī, ‘Teachers of 'Abd Allāh ibn Wahb al-Qurashī’; biographical dictionary of teachers of the Egyptian scholar 'Abdallāh ibn Wahb with rich information about its importance as a primary source of Ibn Wahb. Contains an appended biography of Ibn Wahb.
Kitāb al-mustaġīṯīn bi-lāhāhi, ‘Book of the beseechers of God’; collected hadith with complete isnād traditions containing the Holy Du'ā ' intercessions. In this work Ibn Bashkuwāl cites the titles and authors of thirteen source works. At the beginning of this collection for example, the intercession of the ProphetMuḥammad in the Battle of Badr is linked to the Qur’ān verse:
