Muṣannifak

Persian-born scholar of the early Ottoman madrasas, a descendant of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who taught in Konya, Bursa and Istanbul and wrote a Persian commentary on the Shamsiyya.

Life

According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, ʿAlī b. Muḥammad was born in 803/1400–01 in the village of Shāhrūd near Bisṭām in Khurasan, into a family descended from Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. He began writing so young that he was nicknamed Muṣannifak, ‘the little author’; Ḥājjī Khalīfa records that his commentary on al-Taftāzānī’s grammar Irshād al-hādī, written in 823/1420 at the age of twenty, was his first work. In 812/1409–10 he went with his brother to Herat, where he studied with Jalāl al-Dīn Yūsuf al-Awbahī, a pupil of al-Taftāzānī, and with Quṭb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Harawī, and read Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī law; he also took the Sufi path from a deputy of Zayn al-Dīn al-Khwāfī.

In 842/1438 he moved to Anatolia and taught in Konya, where the later grand vizier Karamānī Meḥmed Pasha was among his students, then at the Sulṭāniyya madrasa in Bursa. At the invitation of Maḥmūd Pasha, grand vizier of Mehmed II, he came to Istanbul, where the sultan granted him a daily stipend of 80 akçe, and he accompanied the Bosnian campaign of 867/1463. He endowed his books to the Ṣaḥn-i Thamān madrasas, died in Istanbul and was buried at Eyüp. The TDV gives 875/1470 for his death; Ḥājjī Khalīfa has 871/1466–67 in several entries.

The TDV lists more than twenty works, in Arabic and Persian, on exegesis, law and legal theory, grammar, rhetoric, theology, Sufism and ethics. In logic he wrote a commentary on the Shamsiyya and a gloss on al-Iṣfahānī’s commentary on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār. Ḥājjī Khalīfa describes the Shamsiyya commentary as written in Persian, beginning ḥamd-i sipās u sitāyish-i bī-ḥadd u qiyās.

Works

• Sharḥ al-Shamsiyya (in Persian) — بر al-Risāla al-ShamsiyyaManuscripts: Süleymaniye, Şehid Ali Paşa 1792; Esad Efendi 1956 (TDV). Persian according to Kashf al-ẓunūn.شرح
• Ḥāshiya ʿalā Sharḥ Maṭāliʿ al-anwārOn Maḥmūd al-Iṣfahānī’s commentary on al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār (Süleymaniye, Fatih 2611) (TDV).حاشیہ
• Tuḥfa-yi MaḥmūdiyyaPersian advice for rulers and viziers, dedicated to Maḥmūd Pasha and finished in 861/1457; it contains information on his life and travels (Kashf al-ẓunūn, TDV).تصنیف
• al-Ḥudūd wa-l-aḥkāmA dictionary of Ḥanafī legal terms arranged by the chapters of law (ed. Beirut 1991) (TDV).تصنیف
• al-Shifāʾ fī tafsīr kalām Allāh (al-Muḥammadiyya)A Qurʾān commentary, mostly in Persian, written for Mehmed II (TDV).تصنیف

Reception

His Shamsiyya commentary survives in manuscript only; it is one of the commentaries Ḥājjī Khalīfa lists after those of Quṭb al-Dīn and al-Taftāzānī (see ‘The commentaries on the Shamsiyya’).