Habib ibn Muhammad al-Ajami al-Basri, known simply as Habib al-Ajami (حبيب العجمي), died in 156 AH / 773 CE. He was a Persian settled in Basra who spent the…
Habib ibn Muhammad al-Ajami al-Basri, known simply as Habib al-Ajami (حبيب العجمي), died in 156 AH / 773 CE. He was a Persian settled in Basra who spent the first half of his life lending money at interest and the second half giving it away, and who is remembered less for what he taught than for the completeness of his turning. The grave attributed to him stands in the Shawaka quarter of Karkh, on the west bank of the Tigris in Baghdad. The moneylender the children ran from Habib was a man of property in Basra and made his living from riba. The accounts of his repentance agree on the shape of it even where they differ on the detail: he was out collecting a debt when he passed a group of children who scattered at the sight of him, one of them calling out that the usurer was coming and that his misfortune would settle on whoever stood near him. He went from there to the circle of al-Hasan al-Basri, sat through the sermon, and wept. What followed was not a private resolution. He returned every sum he had taken unlawfully, forgave the debts still owed to him, and gave away the rest, and the same neighbours who had avoided him began to come to him for supplication. Abu Nu'aym preserves the report that he was afterwards asked how a man reaches such a state and answered without ornament: He whose repentance is sincere, Allah conceals his past. Abu Nu'aym al-Isbahani, Hilyat al-Awliya A Persian tongue and an Arabic heart The name al-Ajami was given to him because he was not an Arab and his recitation carried it. The Basrans noticed that he stumbled over the Fatiha, and the reply attributed to him has outlived everything else said about him — that his tongue was Persian but his heart was Arab. Al-Dhahabi records him among the ascetics of Basra rather than among its jurists, and the early notices consistently place him in that company: a man of prayer, night vigil and answered supplication, not of legal opinion. He sat with al-Hasan al-Basri and heard from Ibn Sirin and Bakr ibn Abdullah al-Muzani. Hammad ibn Salama and Ja'far ibn Sulayman al-Duba'i narrated from him, which is how the little that survives of his speech reached the collections at all. The hut where al-Hasan al-Basri hid The best-known story about him belongs to the years of al-Hajjaj. Al-Hasan al-Basri, sought by the governor's men, took shelter in Habib's hut on the riverbank. When the soldiers came and asked whether al-Hasan was inside, Habib told them plainly that he was, and they searched the hut and did not find him. Al-Hasan afterwards asked him what had made him give him up. Habib's answer, as the biographers relate it, was that he had told the truth and Allah had protected them both by it, and that al-Hasan had occupied himself with knowledge while he had occupied himself with obedience. What survives is not a legal report but a portrait of how Basra remembered him: a man whose plain honesty was treated as a kind of shelter. What he left He wrote nothing. There is no book of his, no risala, no collected letters, and the reports that survive are short: a line of counsel, a supplication, a scene witnessed by someone who happened to be present. What he did leave was a link in a chain. The Basran ascetic tradition passed from al-Hasan al-Basri through Habib to Dawud al-Ta'i and from him to Ma'ruf al-Karkhi, whose graveyard lies a short distance from the Shawaka quarter where Habib's own maqam now stands. The grave He died in 156 AH / 773 CE, with 130 AH also reported. The early historians place his death and burial in Basra, where he had lived his whole adult life; the grave visited today is the maqam in Shawaka, in the Karkh half of Baghdad, which Iraqi tradition has long attributed to him. Both accounts are old and neither cancels the other, and Baghdadis have treated the Shawaka site as his for centuries. It sits in a dense residential quarter near the Tigris, a small domed chamber reached through the lanes rather than from a main road, kept by local families and visited quietly. Most who come pair it with the graveyard of Ma'ruf al-Karkhi nearby, following the same chain in stone that the biographers set down in ink.