Travels and Cities of the Ḥadīth Studies: An Analysis of Buldān in the Islamic Intellectual History

Abstract Biographical materials of cities or regions are arguably a part of scattered Muslim historical compositions, with a noticeable impact on the shaping of literary traditions in classical Islam. This article aims to draw attention to the concept of buldān in the Islamic intellectual history, which is largely converged with the concept of ṭabaqāt , or generational structure in the theoretical treatises as classified by the classical Ḥadīth scholars. Based on the answers to this question, the task involves analysing both theoretical and practical aspects of Ḥadīth collections and Ḥadīth theoretical treatises along with biographical dictionaries of the earlier periods, beginning with the sixth/twelfth century and then going back to the second/eighth century. Our historical research and discursive approach have pointed out that the representations of cities or regions in the biographical dictionaries of Ḥadīth scholars carry culturally and historically significant impacts, in addition to an insight that early Muslim scholars correlated knowledge with social endurance of cities.