Abu Ishaq al-Tha'labi

Al-Thaʿlabi (Abū Isḥāḳ Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Nīsābūrī al-Thaʿlabī أبو اسحاق أحمد بن محمد بن ابراهيم الثعلبي; died November 1035) was an eleventh-century Islamic scholar of Persian origin.

He was accorded a high rank by Sunni scholars. In Tabaqat al-Kubra of Volume 3 page 23 the appraisal of Thalabi is as follows: "Allamah Thalabi was the greatest scholar of his time with regard to knowledge of the Quran and Imam of Ahl'ul Sunnah, Abu Qasim al Qurshree commented ' I saw Allah in a dream, I was conversing with Him and vice versa, during our conversation, Allah said ' a pious man is coming, I looked and Ahmad bin Thalabi was coming towards us.'"

Works
Al-Thaʿlabī is known for two works: the Tafsir al-Thalabi and a book on the stories of the prophets, ʿArāʾis al-madjālis fī ḳiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ ('brides of the sessions in tales of the prophets'). The latter has been characterised as 'a work of popular imagination designed for education and entertainment. Organised according to the historical sequence of the prophets, many of the accounts are elaborations from the same sources used by al-Ṭabarī ... It has become the standard source of Islamic prophet stories, alongside the work of al-Kisāʾī'. Unlike al-Thaʿlabī's Tafsīr, this has been printed many times.

Editions and translations

 * al-Thaʻlabī, Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ (Cairo, 1954)
 * Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʻlabī, Lives of the Prophets, trans. by W. M. Brinner, Studies in Arabic Literature, 23 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), ISBN 9004125892, ISBN 9789004125896