al-Mahalli

Jalal al-Din Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Mahalli (791-864 AH / 1389-1459 CE) was a leading scholar of fifteenth-century Cairo under Mamluk rule. His family name, "al-Mahalli," points to origins in Mahalla al-Kubra in the Nile Delta, though he himself was born and spent his career in Cairo. He worked within the Shafi'i school of Islamic law (one of Sunni Islam's four main legal traditions) and, in theology, is associated with the Ash'ari school. Sources praise him for exacting scholarship across law, theology, grammar, and rhetoric, and report that he declined the office of chief judge (qadi al-qudat) offered under the Mamluk sultan Jaqmaq, supporting himself instead through trade. He taught law at the Mu'ayyadiyya and Barquqiyya madrasas (colleges).

He is best remembered for two works: Kanz al-raghibin, a commentary on al-Nawawi's Shafi'i legal manual, and above all the Tafsir al-Jalalayn ("Commentary of the Two Jalals"), a famously brief, word-by-word gloss on the Qur'an. As tradition relates it, al-Mahalli wrote roughly half of the commentary, beginning at Surat al-Kahf and running to the end of the Qur'an, before his death. His young student Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti later supplied the missing first half, producing the unified text that remains among the most widely used Qur'an commentaries in the Sunni world. In Islamic belief the Qur'an is the revealed word of God conveyed through the Prophet Muhammad; al-Mahalli's role was that of interpreter, not author.