Al-Fihrist

Abu'l-Faraj Muhammad bin Is'hāq al-Nadim (Arabic: ابوالفرج محمد بن إسحاق النديم‎‎) (died September 17, 995 or 998) was a Muslim scholar and bibliographer, possibly of Persian origin. He is famous as the author of Kitāb al-Fihrist. It is, in his own words,

an Index of the books of all nations, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, which are extant in the Arabic language and script, on every branch of knowledge; comprising information as to their compilers and the classes of their authors, together with the genealogies of those persons, the dates of their birth, the length of their lives, the times of their death, the places to which they belonged, their merits and their faults, since the beginning or every science that has been invented down to the present epoch : namely, the year 377 of the Hijra.

Very little is actually known about his life. He was a bookseller, a calligrapher who copied manuscripts for sale, as his father, known as al-Warrāq (الورّاق), was before him. He lived in Baghdad and sometimes he mentions a sojourn in Mosul. In 988 AD, the year his book was compiled, he reports he was in Constantinople (Dar al-Rum). However, Carlo Alfonso Nallino believes this is a misunderstanding and Dar al-Rum does not mean Constantinople, rather al-Nadim meant that he met someone in a Christian neighborhood in Baghdad.

Of his teachers he mentions al-Sirafi (died 978-9), the Munajjimid Ali ibn Harun ibn al-Munajjim (died 963) and the philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Mantiqi. He belonged to the circle of a son of 'Ali b. 'Isa the "Good Vizier" of the Banu al-Jarrah, whom he praises for his profound knowledge of the logic and the sciences of the Greeks, Persians and Indians. Ibn al-Nadim also met in his house the Christian philosopher Ibn al-Khammar. With these men, none of whom was an orthodox Sunni, he shared an admiration for philosophy and especially for Aristotle, and the Greek and Hindu sciences of antiquity (before Islam). He admired their breadth of outlook and their air of toleration.

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