Abu al-Hasan Bakri

Abū al-Ḥasan Bakrī[a] is the purported author of several Islamic works in Arabic, most notably a biography of Muḥammad entitled Kitāb al-anwār ('Book of Lights').

Franz Rosenthal, Boaz Shoshan and Frederick Colby all accept that Bakrī existed, at least as a working hypothesis.

Accepting that Bakrī was the final compiler or rāwī (transmitter) of the Anwār, Rosenthal argued that he wrote in the late thirteenth century.

[2] On the other hand, there is a citation to a certain Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAbd Allāh al-Bakrī in the Kitāb badʿ al-khalq wa-qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ of ʿUmāra ibn Wathīma [fr], who died in 902.

[8] These are mostly fictional novelesque treatments of the early Muslim conquests, that is, maghāzī, although a mawlid (poem in praise of Muḥammad) is also attributed to him.

[15] The Anwār also circulated in Spain in aljamiado form, that is, translated into Andalusi Romance and written in Arabic script, under the title El Libro de las luces.

[9] A major element is the nūr Muḥammadī, Muḥammad's special light or essence, which is primordial and transmitted from Adam to him.

[17] The Anwār describes the creation of the light by Gabriel through the mixing of a white substance (qabḍa bayḍāʾ) with dust from the ground where Muḥammad's grave will lie.

[20] In the fifteenth century, al-ʿAsqalānī wrote that "there is not even one accurate description of a single one of Muḥammad's expeditions" in Bakrī's works.