Najm al-Din al-Nasafi

Abu Hafs Najm al-Din Umar ibn Muhammad al-Nasafi was born around 1068 in Nasaf, on the site of present-day Qarshi, one of the major centres of learning in Transoxiana. His name records his origins: “al-Nasafi” points to his home town, “al-Samarqandi” to Samarkand, where he spent most of his life, and “al-Hanafi” to his Hanafi school of law.

He received his first education in Nasaf, studying hadith with the hafiz Abu Raja Qutayba al-Nasafi and literature and law with Abu’l-Hasan Ali al-Kasbawi, and later learning from Abu’l-Yusr al-Bazdawi and other teachers. He also studied law in Bukhara. After about the age of thirty he moved to Samarkand, studied at the learning centre Dar al-Juzjaniyya and later taught there. By his own account he had heard hadith from some 550 shaykhs.

In 1113 he set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca; on the way he met scholars in Baghdad and both heard and taught hadith, but the journey was short and he returned home. He spent the rest of his life in Samarkand and wrote about a hundred works on law, theology, Quranic exegesis, hadith, history and poetry.

The best known are “Al-Aqa’id al-Nasafiyya”, a concise statement of Sunni creed in its Hanafi-Maturidi form; the Quranic commentary “Al-Taysir fi’l-tafsir”; the versified summary of legal disagreements “Al-Manzuma al-Nasafiyya”; and “Al-Qand fi dhikr ‘ulama’ Samarqand”, a biographical dictionary of the scholars of Samarkand. His best-known student was Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani, author of “Al-Hidaya”.

Al-Nasafi died in Samarkand on 2 December 1142 and was buried in the Chokardiza cemetery beside Abu Mansur al-Maturidi. Sa’d al-Din al-Taftazani (died 1390) wrote a commentary on the “Aqa’id”, and by the seventeenth century more than fifty commentaries had been written on the text. In 2001 the National Encyclopedia of Uzbekistan publishing house issued an abridged Uzbek translation of “Al-Qand” under the title “Samarqandiya”.