Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad ibn al-Khafif (882-982) known as al-Shaykh al-Kabir or Shaykh al-Shirazi was a Persian[5] mystic and sufi from Iran.

Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021) said of him: "The Folk (al-Qawm, i.e. the Sufis) do not have anyone older than him nor more complete in his state and reality today."

Al-Sulami said, "Abu 'Abd Allah [ibn Khafif] came from a family of princes, but he practiced asceticism (zuhd) to the point that he said, 'I would collect rags from refuse-heaps, wash them, and mend whatever I could use for clothing, and I spent 14 months breaking my fast at night with a handful of beans.'"

The Collection of works of Ibn Khafif The collected works of Ibn Khafīf Shirazi have been published for the first time in a two-volume set by Moein Kazemifar (Shiraz University, Iran), with collaboration and a foreword by Florian Sobieroj (Schiller University Jena, Germany).

The two volumes presented by Dr. Moein Kazemifar (Muʿīn Kāẓimīfar) of Shiraz University include, besides the Arabic-language Awṣāf al-qulūb, the major extant works of Ibn Khafīf (d. 371/982) in the original Arabic and in Persian translation made by himself or by others.

Kazemifar highlights that, while Annemarie Schimmel omitted this text in her German-language introduction to Daylamī’s biography, Carl Brockelmann did mention it in Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (supplement vol.

Fuat Sezgin, on the other hand, lists three works by Ibn Khafīf with extant manuscripts but does not include Awṣāf al-qulūb (GAS, Leiden, 1967, vol.

[15] Moein Kazemifar, in a article, has provided three categories of evidence to demonstrate that the treatise Awṣāf al-qulūb is indeed authored by Ibn Khafīf.

First, he examines the isnāds (chains of transmission) that identify the individuals who transmitted the ḥadīths cited in Awṣāf al-qulūb (intr., p. 8).