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Sharaf al-Din al-Busiri
Imam Sharaf al-Din al-Busiri محمد بن سعيد البوصيري
608-696 AH / 1211-1294 CE
10
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About
Muhammad ibn Saʿid al-Busiri (608–696 AH / 1211–1294 CE) was an Egyptian poet and Sufi whose verse in praise of the Prophet Muhammad has been loved across the Muslim world for more than seven centuries. He was born in Upper Egypt, his nisba drawn from the village of Abusir, and raised between there and Dalas. Moving to Cairo as a young man, he memorized the Qurʾan, studied the Arabic sciences, and earned his living as a clerk and a skilled calligrapher. In maturity he entered the Shadhili Sufi path under Abu al-ʿAbbas al-Mursi, the spiritual successor of Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, and his poetry came to carry the devotion and longing of that tradition.
His enduring fame rests on the Qasida al-Burda, the Poem of the Mantle, composed in roughly 160 verses of praise and supplication. By long-told account he wrote it while gravely ill and was healed after seeing the Prophet in a dream, who draped him in his mantle, the burda that gave the poem its name. The Burda became perhaps the most widely recited, sung, memorized, and commented-upon poem in Islamic literature, drawing commentaries from scholars across the centuries, several of which accompany the translations offered here. Al-Busiri also composed the Hamziyya, a longer ode in the Prophet's praise. He died in Egypt and is honored as one of the great voices of Prophetic devotion. (Some sources give his death as 691 AH.)
His enduring fame rests on the Qasida al-Burda, the Poem of the Mantle, composed in roughly 160 verses of praise and supplication. By long-told account he wrote it while gravely ill and was healed after seeing the Prophet in a dream, who draped him in his mantle, the burda that gave the poem its name. The Burda became perhaps the most widely recited, sung, memorized, and commented-upon poem in Islamic literature, drawing commentaries from scholars across the centuries, several of which accompany the translations offered here. Al-Busiri also composed the Hamziyya, a longer ode in the Prophet's praise. He died in Egypt and is honored as one of the great voices of Prophetic devotion. (Some sources give his death as 691 AH.)
