Note 582 — Chapter VI

Hassan al Baśri was the son of an affranchised man, called Mulla Zaid ben Tabeth, and of a slave woman, belonging to Omm Salmath, one of Muhammed the prophet’s wives. Hassan acquired the reputation of the first scholastic theologian among the Muselmans. He is surnamed al Baśri, because his father was a slave in Maissan, a borough of the dependencies of Baśra, or Bassora, and because he kept his school in that town, where different sectaries often came to dispute with him. Wassel Eben Ata, his disciple, deviating from his opinions, became the chief of the Mâtazalahs (see note 1, p. 325). Hassan al Baśri had seen the khalif Osman, and Eben Abbas; on that account he quotes in his works what he had learned from them. He died in the year of the Hejira 110, A. D. 728, and left a work entitled Hadis sherif, containing a collection of the traditions which he knew relatively to each of the fifty-four feridhat, or “obligatory precepts,” of the Muselman law.