Rashid al-Din Hamadani

Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah Hamadani (1247 - 13 July 1318) was the Ilkhanid vizier, physician and historian whose Jami' al-Tawarikh, the Compendium of Chronicles commissioned by Ghazan, is the most comprehensive Persian source on the Mongol period and one of the first attempts at a history of the whole world. ¹ Trained as a physician, he rose at the court of Abaqa to become grand vizier under Ghazan and Oldjaitu, directed fiscal, agricultural and building reforms, and founded the Rab'-i Rashidi scholarly complex beside Tabriz, with its scriptorium, mosque, schools and hospital. ^{1 2}

All three article texts agree that he was born into a Jewish family of Hamadan — his father an apothecary-physician at court — and that he embraced Islam at about the age of thirty, in 1277 by the English article's dating. ^{1 2 3} The Arabic article's religion section preserves a minority scholarly view that he was born Muslim, against the majority it quotes from Ibn Kathir, al-Dhahabi and Ibn Hajar, while agreeing that he lived the life of a sincere Muslim. ² No school is settled for him in his record: the Arabic article names the Hanafi school for him in a single passage on Oldjaitu's change of school, and the English article's description of him as an ardent Sunni Muslim rests on his Letters, whose authenticity the same article reports as disputed and probably forged — one naming text and one doubted attestation do not meet the two-text standard, so his faith is recorded as unknown with the conversion and both readings stated in full. ^{2 1}

After Oldjaitu's death in 1316, Rashid al-Din's rivals at the court of Abu Sa'id charged him with having poisoned the late Ilkhan, and he was executed on 13 July 1318 at the age of seventy; the Arabic article dates the killing to Jumada I 718 AH and recounts that his property was confiscated and the Rab'-i Rashidi given over to the soldiery. ^{1 2 4}