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al-Sharif al-Murtada

al-Sharif al-Murtada

965 CE–1044 CE · Baghdad

Abu al-Qasim 'Ali ibn al-Husayn, known as al-Sharif al-Murtada and by the honorific title 'Alam al-Huda ("Banner of Guidance"), was a leading Twelver (Imami) Shi'i scholar of Buyid-era Baghdad. He was born there in 355 AH (965 CE) into a distinguished family of descendants of the Prophet; his younger brother was the poet al-Sharif al-Radi (born 359 AH/970 CE), traditionally credited with compiling the Nahj al-Balagha. He studied under the theologian al-Shaykh al-Mufid and, after his teacher's death, became a central authority for Imami communities, fielding written questions from as far as Aleppo, Mosul, and the Levantine coast.

He held the office of naqib al-ashraf, the recognized head of the Prophet's descendants in Iraq (an appointment of the Buyid and Abbasid authorities). As a thinker he is remembered for developing a strongly rationalist Imami kalam (speculative theology) and usul al-fiqh (legal theory); historians note his affinities with the Mu'tazila, a rationalist theological school, partly transmitted through the Mu'tazili judge 'Abd al-Jabbar, under whom he studied. His major works include al-Shafi fi al-imama (a defense of the Imamate), the legal-theory treatise al-Dhari'a, and Tanzih al-anbiya'. His most famous student was al-Shaykh al-Tusi.

He died in Baghdad in 436 AH (1044 CE). Where he is buried is disputed in the tradition: some reports place his grave at Karbala near the shrine of Imam al-Husayn, others at Kazimayn.

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BaghdadIraq

What they did here

Born in Baghdad in 355 AH (965 CE) into a prominent Alid family (descendants of the Prophet). He was the elder brother of the poet al-Sharif al-Radi (born 359 AH/970 CE). Sources give the birth as 355 AH; expressed in CE this is conventionally 965-966.

About Baghdad

Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.

Across the traditions, in Baghdad at the same time

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Sharif al-Murtada’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(11)