Jamal al-Din al-Mizzi

Jamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf ibn al-Zakī ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Yūsuf ibn Abd al-Malik ibn Yūsuf al-Kalbī al-Quḍā’ī al-Mizzī, (), also called Al-Ḥāfiẓ Abī al-Hajjāj, was a Syrian muhaddith and the foremost `Ilm al-rijāl Islamic scholar.
Life.
Al-Mizzī was born near Aleppo in 1256 under the reign of the last Ayyubid emir An-Nasir Yusuf. From 1260 the region was ruled by the "na'ib al-saltana" (viceroys) of the Mamluk Sultanate. In childhood he moved with his family to the village of al-Mizza outside Damascus, where he was educated in Qur’ān and fiqh. 
In his twenties he began his studies to become a muḥaddith and learned from the masters. His fellow pupil and life-long friend was Taqī al-Dīn ibn Taymiyya. He travelled across the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, Syria (), and Ḥijāz and became the greatest `Ilm al-rijāl () scholar of the Muslim world and an expert grammarian and philologist of Arabic.
His youthful flirtation with Ṣūfisim ended when Ibn Taymiyya persuaded him to cut his Ṣūfī contacts. It was also Taymiyya’s ideological influence, which although contrary to his own Shāfi’ī legalist inclination, that led to a stint in jail. Despite his affiliation with Ibn Taymiyya he became head of the "Dār al-Ḥadīth al-Ashrafiyya", a leading ḥadīth academy in Damascus, in 1319. And although he professed the Ash’arī doctrine suspicion continued about his true beliefs.
He died at "Dar al-Hadith al-Ashrafiyyah" in Damascus in 1341/2 and was buried in the "Sufiyyah" graveyard.