HASAN  UL-BASRI [

Abu Saud ul-Hasan ibn Abi-l-Hasan Vassar ul-Basri], (642–728 or 737), Arabian theologian, wasborn at Medina . His father was a freedman of Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the An¢r (Helpers of the Prophet), his mother a client of Umm Salama, a wife of Mahomet . Tradition says that Umm Salama often nursed Hasan in his infancy . He was thus one of the Tdbi'un (i.e. of the generation that succeeded the Helpers) . He became a teacher of Basra and founded a school there . Among his pupils was Wasil ibn 'Ata, the founder of the Mo'tazilites . He himself was a great supporter of orthodoxy and the most important representative of asceticism in the time of its first development . With him fear is the basis of morality, and sadness the characteristic of his religion . Life is only a pilgrimage, and comfort must be denied to subdue the passions . Many writers testify to the purity of his life and to his excelling in the virtues of Mahomet's own companions . He was " as if he were in the other world." In politics, too, he adhered to the earliest principles of Islam, being strictly opposed to the inherited caliphate of the Omayyads and a believer in the election of the caliph . His life is given in Nawawi's Biographical Dictionary (ed .

F . Wiistenfeld,

Gottingen, 1842-1847) . Cf . R . Dozy, Essai sur l'histoire de l'islamisme, pp . 201 sqq . (Leiden and Paris, 1879) ; A. von Kremer, Cuiturgeschichtliche Streifzuge, p . 5 seq . ; R . A . Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs, pp . 225-227 (London, 1907) .

(G . W .