Al-Suyuti Biography

Jalal al-Din Abu al-Fadl Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr al-Suyuti was an Egyptian polymath of Persian descent, considered by many later scholars the mujaddid (renewer) of the tenth Islamic century. Born in Cairo on 1 Rajab 849 AH / 3 October 1445 CE and orphaned at five, he memorized the Qur'an by the age of eight and went on to study under approximately one hundred and fifty teachers in fiqh, hadith, tafsir, theology, history, rhetoric, philology, arithmetic, and medicine. His family's nisba derives from the town of Asyut in Upper Egypt.

Al-Suyuti was extraordinarily prolific even by the standards of his era; he himself listed 283 of his works in Husn al-Muhadarah, and modern scholars have counted as many as one thousand titles attributed to him. He completed Tafsir al-Jalalayn after the death of his teacher Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli, producing the most accessible classical Qur'anic commentary still in print. His al-Itqan fi Ulum al-Qur'an became a foundational textbook in the Qur'anic sciences, and al-Durr al-Manthur remains a key narration-based tafsir. His Tarikh al-Khulafa covered the history of the caliphs from Abu Bakr through the Mamluks, and his Jami' al-Saghir continues to be a widely consulted hadith reference.

Late in life he withdrew from public scholarship and the patronage of the sultans, devoting himself to writing in seclusion on the island of al-Rawda in the Nile. He died in Cairo in 911 AH / 1505 CE. Honored with the rare title Shaykh al-Islam, al-Suyuti was Shafi'i in fiqh and shaped virtually every discipline of the Islamic sciences as a compiler, abridger, and synthesizer of the classical tradition.