Sa'd al-Din al-Taftazani

Sa’d al-Din Mas’ud ibn Umar al-Taftazani was born in 1322 in the village of Taftazan in Khorasan. He studied in the madrasas of Khorasan and Transoxiana; among his teachers are named Adud al-Din al-Iji and Qutb al-Din al-Razi.

For nearly three decades, roughly 1340 to 1372, he moved from town to town teaching in the madrasas of Herat, Ghijduvan, Khwarazm and elsewhere. Russian-language sources add that he also spent time at the court of Khan Jani Beg in Sarai and with Shah Shuja in Shiraz.

His early works deal with grammar and logic: a commentary on Arabic morphology (around 1338), followed by a handbook of logic and theology. The rhetoric commentaries al-Mutawwal and al-Mukhtasar and the legal-theory work al-Talwih date from the 1340s and 1350s.

In his later years he came to Samarkand at Timur’s invitation and stayed at his court until his death. It was there, in the early 1380s, that he completed Sharh al-Maqasid, one of the most comprehensive works of Islamic theology.

In creed he is counted as an Ash’arite, yet on some questions, above all human free will, he stands close to the Maturidis; his commentary on al-Nasafi’s creed prompted more than fifty commentaries of its own in later centuries.

Al-Taftazani died in Samarkand in 1390 and, according to tradition, was buried in Sarakhs. His books were studied in Ottoman madrasas and are still used in religious schools today.