Ikrima, Mawla of Ibn Abbas: Accused of Lying and Kharijism — Bukhari's Trust, Muslim's Avoidance

The Warning Given to Nafi'

Madinah, in the closing decades of the first Islamic century. Abdullah ibn Umar — son of the second caliph, one of the most careful narrators among the Companions — speaks to Nafi', his own freed slave and student, the man through whom the famous "golden chain" of hadith (Malik, from Nafi', from Ibn Umar) would later pass. What he says is preserved in the biographical dictionaries of hadith criticism, and it is not general advice. It names a man.

That man is Ikrima, the freed slave (mawla) of Abdullah ibn Abbas — the Companion celebrated as the "interpreter of the Qur'an." Open almost any classical tafsir and his name is everywhere: "Ikrima, from Ibn Abbas." Yet the words attributed to Ibn Umar about him, as recorded by al-Mizzi in Tahdhib al-Kamal and al-Dhahabi in Mizan al-I'tidal, are these: