I’ve recently been studying the manuscripts copied by Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Suḥaymī (d. 1765), today @mikati_rana and I visited his mansion. Al-Suḥaymī was a wealthy scholar of the Shāfi‘ī school and authored works on a range of topics. He was also an active copyist. Al-Suhaymī left behind more than a hundred manuscripts on a wide range of topics that he copied over the course of at least 30 years. I have yet to determine how he acquired his wealth, but the opulence of his house leaves little doubt that he was not copying for the money.

Yesterday @mikati_rana and I visited the mosque and mausoleum of the Sāda al-Wafā’iyya.The family, Idrisid sayyids, was one of the leading Sufi dynasties of Ottoman Egypt. The leadership of the descendants of the Prophet in Egypt alternated between them and the Bakrī Family. The fourteenth-century eponym of the family and Sufi order, was given the name Wafā’ because one year the Nile had not completed its annual rise, and he was asked by the Sultan to pray at the Nilometer, and the river miraculously began to rise as a result.

There was some interest in women hadith transmitters, so here is a bit from the chapter in my book on the topic. The chapter demonstrates that in all but exceptional cases women transmitters became prominent due to their outliving most, if not all, of their male contemporaries. As the last living links to long-dead generations of transmitters these women possessed a rare degree of proximity to the prophet and the luminaries that made up their chains of transmission.