Abū Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī al-Kindī was a 9th-century Arab Muslim historian, poet and preacher (qāṣṣ) active in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. He was a Shīʿī of the akhbārī school, a son of a student of the sixth imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, who died in 765.
Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Duraid al-Azdī al-Baṣrī ad-Dawsī Al-Zahrani, or Ibn Duraid, a leading grammarian of Baṣrah, was described as "the most accomplished scholar, ablest philologer and first poet of the age", was from Baṣra in the Abbasid era. Ibn Duraid is best known today as the lexicographer of the influential dictionary, the Jamharat al-Lugha. The fame of this comprehensive dictionary of the Arabic language is second only to its predecessor, the Kitab al-'Ayn of al-Farahidi.
Shihab al-Din Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, commonly known as Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari or Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-‘Umārī was an Arab historian born in Damascus. His major works include at-Taʾrīf bi-al-muṣṭalaḥ ash-sharīf, on the subject of the Mamluk administration, and Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār, an encyclopedic collection of related information. The latter was translated into French by Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes in 1927.
Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm was an Andalusian Muslim polymath, historian, muhaddith, jurist, philosopher, and theologian, born in the Caliphate of Córdoba, present-day Spain. Described as one of the strictest hadith interpreters, Ibn Hazm was a leading proponent and codifier of the Zahiri school of Islamic thought and produced a reported 400 works, of which only 40 still survive. In all, his written works amounted to some 80 000 pages. Described as one of the fathers of comparative religion, the Encyclopaedia of Islam refers to him as having been one of the leading thinkers of the Muslim world.
Abū l-Fatḥ ʿUthmān ibn Jinnī, best known as Ibn Jinnī, was a specialist on Arabic grammar, a philologist, and a philosopher of language. He was born in Mosul to a Greek Christian slave of a certain Sulayman ibn Fahd ibn Ahmad al-Azdi.
Abū al-Fiḍā’ ‘Imād ad-Dīn Ismā‘īl ibn ‘Umar ibn Kathīr al-Qurashī al-Damishqī, known as Ibn Kathīr, was a highly influential Arab historian, exegete and scholar during the Mamluk era in Syria. An expert on tafsir and fiqh (jurisprudence), he wrote several books, including a fourteen-volume universal history titled Al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya.
Ibn Khaldun was an Arab, sociologist, philosopher, and historian widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages, and considered by many to be the father of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography studies.
Aḥmad bin Muḥammad bin Ibrāhīm bin Abū Bakr ibn Khallikān, better known as Ibn Khallikān, was a renowned Islamic historian who compiled the celebrated biographical encyclopedia of Muslim scholars and important men in Muslim history, Deaths of Eminent Men and the Sons of the Epoch. Due to this achievement, he is regarded as the most eminent writer of biographies in Islamic history.
Abu 'Abd Allah Jamal al-Din Muḥammad ibn Abd Allāh ibn Malik al-Ta'i al-Jayyani was an Arab grammarian born in Jaén. After leaving al-Andalus for the Near East, and taught Arabic language and literature in Aleppo and Hamāt, before eventually settled in Damascus, where he began the most productive period of his life. He was a senior master at the Adiliyya Madrasa. His reputation in Arabic literature was cemented by his al-Khulāsa al-alfiyya, a versification of Arabic grammar, for which at least 43 commentaries have been written.
