تفسير الجلالين

Jalal al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Mahalli was a fifteenth-century Egyptian Shafi'i jurist, mufassir, and theologian, best known as the originator of one of the most widely read Qur'anic commentaries in the Islamic world. Born in 791 AH / 1389 CE in Cairo during the Mamluk period, he took his nisba from the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra in the Nile Delta, his family's place of origin. He taught at the prestigious Mu'ayyadiyya and Barquqiyya madrasas in Cairo and earned a reputation for piety, ascetic restraint, and refusal of judicial office even when offered the highest posts in the land — choosing instead to support himself through trade.

Al-Mahalli's scholarship covered fiqh, usul al-fiqh, kalam, grammar, and rhetoric. His Sharh al-Minhaj on al-Nawawi's Minhaj al-Talibin (also known as Kanz al-Raghibin) became a standard manual in Shafi'i jurisprudence, and his commentary on Jam' al-Jawami' by al-Subki remains a core text in the principles of Islamic law. His most enduring contribution, however, was the Tafsir al-Jalalayn — the 'Commentary of the Two Jalals' — which he began at Surat al-Kahf and worked backward to al-Fatiha before his death cut the project short. His student Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti completed the second half in just forty days, producing one of the most popular and widely taught Qur'anic commentaries in Sunni Islam.

Al-Mahalli died in Cairo in 864 AH / 1459 CE. His concise, accessible style — preserved in the Jalalayn — continues to shape introductory tafsir study across the Muslim world more than five centuries after his death.

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.