Structure: Ten Volumes from the Companions to the Sufis

Hilyat al-Awliya is organized in generational layers (tabaqat), beginning with the Prophet's companions and moving forward through successive generations of pious Muslims to Abu Nu'aym's own era. The work covers approximately 700 figures across these generations, devoting to each a collection of biographical notices, spiritual maxims, anecdotes illustrating their character and practice, and hadith they transmitted. This combination of biographical, spiritual, and hadith material is distinctive and reflects Abu Nu'aym's dual formation as a hadith scholar and Sufi sympathizer.

The first volume covers the companions, presenting them not primarily as legal transmitters — as companion biographical works like Al-Isti'ab do — but as spiritual exemplars. The material emphasized is their asceticism, their devotion in prayer, their detachment from worldly things, and their nearness to God. This spiritual emphasis on the companions reflects the Sufi tradition's claim that the companions' way of life embodied the ideal of Islamic spirituality and that the Sufi path is essentially a continuation and elaboration of the companions' approach to inner religious life.

Subsequent volumes cover the Successors (Tabi'in) and the generation after them — figures like al-Hasan al-Basri, Ibn Sirin, Sufyan al-Thawri, Ibrahim al-Nakha'i, and Malik ibn Anas — presenting them through the same spiritual lens. The material for these figures is particularly rich: Abu Nu'aym had access to substantial biographical and hadith material about the first and second centuries AH, and the figures he covers in these volumes were themselves major authorities in the Islamic scholarly tradition.

The later volumes cover the recognized masters of the Sufi tradition: al-Harith al-Muhasibi (the psychologist of the soul), Dhu al-Nun al-Misri (the Egyptian mystic), Bayazid al-Bistami (known for ecstatic utterances), Junayd al-Baghdadi (the 'sober' master of classical Sufism), al-Hallaj (the controversial martyr of love), and many others. Abu Nu'aym's inclusion of al-Hallaj, whose execution for blasphemy was controversial, within a work celebrating Islamic holiness was itself a statement of sympathetic engagement with the more radical Sufi tradition.