About the Ṭabaqāt

The ṭabaqāt — “the generations”, or more exactly “the layers” — is one of the oldest genres of Islamic letters: the ordering of the people of a tradition into the ranks through which it was carried, generation upon generation, from the Prophet ﷺ down to the living. The classical compilers wrote them so that a reader could see at a glance not merely who a man was, but where he stood.

This site is a ṭabaqāt for the web. It is not a chronicle of battles or history, nor a table of lineages; it is a record of stations. For each person we keep what we can find of the name and its honorifics, the station and the epithet by which the tradition honours them, the years of their coming and their return, and — most of all — the traces they left: their sayings, the stories told of them, the day the calendar remembers them on, and the shaykhs and companions to whom they were bound.

It is offered as a result of what Mawlāna Shaykh Nāzim quddisa sirruhu taught us — it is not easy to be righteous, but it is easy to love the righteous — and in the hope expressed by the words at the foot of every page — love the friends of God, in order that they will love you — said by Bāyazīd al-Bisṭāmī quddisa sirruhu. May Allah ﷿ let us love the righteous and may He let us be with them when it will matter most.

A tarjama is the notice devoted to a single person — the unit from which every ṭabaqāt is built. Each one here is laid out the same way:

• The name is given in Arabic and in transliteration, followed by the honorific the tradition attaches to it — raḍiyallāhu ʿanhu for a companion, qaddasa Llāhu sirrahu for a walī, and so on. Where a person is known by an epithet — a byname of spiritual station, never a military rank — it is carried beside the name.
• The medallion at the head of the page is a shamsa — the sunburst that opens an illuminated manuscript. It holds the opening of the biography. Where a photograph survives, it takes the place of the shamsa in an ablaq-striped niche instead.
• The four roundels around it give the station, the year of birth, the year of return, and the count of the traces that survive.
• Below follow the rest of the life, the sayings, the stories, the days on which the person is remembered, and the people to whom they were bound — each related name carrying the tie itself: his shaykh, her father.

The register is one domain of a larger body of work, and it does not hold its content alone. A person’s sayings are drawn from Quotes; the stories told of them from Marifa; the days on which they are remembered from the prayer book at Pray. Each domain keeps its own editorial care, and the register gathers the threads into one place.

Everything shown here is also served as an open, documented JSON API. If you would rather build with the data than read it, begin at the People API.

Biographies and attributions follow the classical sources and the translations of the masters we draw from. Where the tradition itself differs, we have preferred the reading carried by the people of the path. Corrections are welcome and gratefully received.

People is one of several free, open digital services run by Islamic Network — alongside AlAdhan, AlQuran.cloud, Pray, Quotes and Marifa. The work is operated by Mamluk and hosted on Bahriya. Our source code lives at 1x.ax.

Everything published here is offered freely, and always will be. You can reach the wider team via islamic.network/contact.

رَبَّنَا تَقَبَّلْ مِنَّا

Our Lord, accept this from us — insignificant as it is.