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Abu Bakr al-Khassaf

scholar (Qadi) of the Abbasid Court

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 9, 2026
Entity authorityQ17417885
Source-derived summary

Abu Bakr al-Khassaf (Arabic: أبو بكر الخصاف,Abu Bakr Al-Ḫaṣṣāf ) (died 874, full name Abu-Bakr Ahmad Ibn-Amru ash-Shaybani al-Khassaf)

was a Hanafite law scholar (Qadi) at the court of the 14th Abbasid caliph al-Muhtadi.

Abu Bakr was an Arab from the tribe of Banu Shayban. He was born around late 800s. His father was Umar (Amru) Ibn-Muhair.

He is the author of a seminal work on Qādī, known as أدب القاضي Adab al-qādī. A commentary on the work was written by al-Jaṣṣās in the 10th century.

An English translation was published by G. P. Verbit in 2008.

Al-Ḫaṣṣāf is also the author of a Kitāb al-ḥiyal wa-l-maḫārij, a work on legalistic trickery or ḥiyal, and a kitāb aḥkām al-awqāf, on religious institutions or waqf.

The earliest development of this field is the Kitāb al-maḫārij fī l-ḥiyal ("book of evasion and trickery") by Muhammad al-Shaybani (d. 805).

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“Abu Bakr al-Khassaf” enters the record as scholar (Qadi) of the Abbasid Court. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bakr, al-Khassaf and scholar can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 0800. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Bakr, al-Khassaf and scholar.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17417885. VIAF identifies the subject as 2897634. The Library of Congress control number is n88250579. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008.

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This entry incorporates text from Abu Bakr al-Khassaf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.