Scribes of the Prophet, Kuttab Al-Nabi (S)

About the author

Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami: Muhammad Mustafa al-Azami (1930–2017 CE) was an Indian-born scholar of hadith and Qurʾanic studies, widely respected for a calm, evidence-driven defense of the early Islamic textual tradition against the claims of Orientalist critics. Born in Mau, in northern India, he studied at Darul Uloom Deoband, then took a degree in Arabic at Al-Azhar in Cairo, and completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 1966. His Cambridge thesis became "Studies in Early Hadith Literature," a landmark argument that the recording and transmission of hadith began very early, within the lifetime of the Prophet and his Companions, against the skepticism of scholars such as Joseph Schacht. He pursued that line further in "On Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence." His later "The History of the Qurʾanic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments" extended the same comparative method to the transmission of the Qurʾan. Other works include "Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature," "Kuttab al-Nabi" (Scribes of the Prophet), and an introduction to Sahih al-Bukhari. Al-Azami taught for decades at King Saud University in Riyadh, chairing its Islamic Studies department, and held visiting appointments at Princeton, St Cross College Oxford, and the University of Michigan. In 1980 he received the King Faisal International Prize for Islamic Studies. He died on December 20, 2017.