ʿIlm, Shafāʿah, and Barakah: The Resources of Ayyubid and Early Mamluk Ulama

This fascinating glimpse into the way medieval Muslims perceived the working of barakah is offered in Ibn Rajab’s Dhayl Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābilah, an early fourteenth-century biographical dictionary of Hanbali scholars, as a quotation of the Damascene historian Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn al-Maqdisī (d. 643/1245). In the rest of the entry, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn portrays al-Ḥāfiẓ ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Maqdisī (d. 600/1203–4), his uncle, as an outstanding authority on hadith with a special expertise in ʿilm al-rijāl (the study of hadith transmitters), and as a stringent moralist and ascetic