al-Kasani

'Ala' al-Din Abu Bakr ibn Mas'ud al-Kasani was a Hanafi jurist — a scholar of one of the four main Sunni schools of Islamic law (madhhab) — active in the 12th century CE. His nisba (name-of-origin) points to Kasan, a town in the Ferghana Valley in Transoxiana (Central Asia), and the sources do not record his birth date. He studied under the Hanafi master 'Ala' al-Din al-Samarqandi (died 1144), author of the legal compendium Tuhfat al-Fuqaha'. According to the biographical tradition, al-Kasani wrote his own great work, Bada'i' al-Sana'i' fi Tartib al-Shara'i', as a reworking of his teacher's book, and it was accepted as the dowry for his marriage to al-Samarqandi's daughter, Fatima, herself trained in law. Sources report that he then moved west: first to Konya, at the court of the Rum-Seljuk Turks of Anatolia, and afterward to Aleppo in northern Syria, where he was associated with the ruler Nur al-Din Zangi and taught Hanafi law at the Hallawiyya madrasa for the rest of his life. He died in 587 AH / 1191 CE and was buried in Aleppo. His Bada'i' is remembered less as a conventional commentary than as a strikingly systematic, topic-by-topic exposition of Hanafi law; it gained renewed attention after its modern printing in the early 20th century. Some narrative details of his career — especially the courtly episodes — come from later biographers and should be read as tradition rather than firmly documented fact.