Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi

Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Hasan ibn Bashir al-Tirmidhi was born in Termez; the breadth of his learning earned him the epithet al-Hakim, “the Sage”. His dates are uncertain: the Encyclopaedia Iranica places his birth in 820–830 and his death in 907–912, the Turkish TDV Encyclopedia of Islam gives 932 for his death, the inscription on his tomb and some later authors 869, and several Uzbek publications 824–892. The most reliable source on his life is his own short autobiography, “Bad' sha'n Abi Abd Allah” (“How Abu Abd Allah's Affair Began”).

His father, Ali ibn al-Hasan, was a hadith scholar who travelled as far as Baghdad in search of knowledge; according to some accounts, his mother and maternal uncle were also versed in hadith. Al-Tirmidhi writes that he took up the religious sciences in earnest at the age of eight. He later heard hadith from many teachers in Termez and Balkh and studied Hanafi law; Qutayba ibn Sa'id al-Balkhi is named among his teachers.

At twenty-seven or twenty-eight he set out on the pilgrimage, stayed for a while in Iraq to hear hadith and reached Mecca by way of Basra. At the Kaaba, he recalls, he prayed for forgiveness and for the gift of learning the Quran by heart; he began memorising it on the way back and finished at home. Returning to Termez, and inspired by a book of the Syrian ascetic Ahmad ibn Asim al-Antaki, he took up a life of self-discipline — fasting, praying at night and wandering alone in deserted places. In these years he kept company with the renowned Sufis of Khorasan, Ahmad ibn Khadrawayh, Abu Turab al-Nakhshabi and Yahya ibn Mu'adh al-Razi, and disciples began to gather around him.

His writings, above all “The Seal of the Saints” and “The Reasons of the Sharia” (Ilal al-shari'a), angered the jurists. He was accused of ranking the saints above the prophets, of speaking of the love of God in unheard-of terms and of innovation; he was denounced to the governor of Balkh, who made him promise in writing not to speak of such things. According to several sources, he had to leave Termez and lived in Balkh and then in Nishapur, where he won many followers. He rejected the charges himself, and modern scholars note that nowhere in his books does he place sainthood above prophethood.

In “The Seal of the Saints” (also known as “Sirat al-awliya”, “The Life of the Saints”) al-Tirmidhi set out, for the first time in Islam, a complete doctrine of walaya, the sainthood of the friends of God: just as the prophets have their last and highest, the “seal of the prophets”, the saints have a seal of their own, the highest among them; he also sketched a hierarchy of saints. He distinguished knowledge gained by study from mystical knowledge (ma'rifa), a light that God grants to the heart. The struggle of reason and passion for the heart, the training of the self and the inner purpose of the law's commands and prohibitions are the subjects of his other books. His largest work is “Nawadir al-usul”, built around 291 hadiths. Some eighty works are attributed to him (some sources say as many as four hundred), and a large part of them survives.

He spent his last years in his native city, writing and teaching until the end, and died and was buried there. His followers were known as the Hakimiyya; the most prominent were Abu Bakr al-Warraq and Abu Ali al-Juzjani. Al-Ghazali drew on his book on self-delusion in “The Revival of the Religious Sciences”, and Ibn Arabi answered the questions of “The Seal of the Saints” in his “Meccan Revelations”; Baha al-Din Naqshband is said to have revered him as a great saint. His mausoleum on the site of old Termez, together with its mosque and khanqah (9th–15th centuries), is still a place of pilgrimage, known locally as Termiz-ota.