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Al-Sharif al-Radi
Al-Sharif al-Radi
969 CE–1015 CE · Baghdad
Al-Sharif al-Radi (Abu al-Hasan Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Musawi, 359 AH / 969–70 CE – 406 AH / 1015 CE) was a Baghdadi scholar, poet, and Twelver Shia sayyid descended from the Imams through Musa al-Kazim, who studied under al-Shaykh al-Mufid. He is best known as the compiler of Nahj al-Balagha ("The Path of Eloquence"), an anthology of sermons, letters, and aphorisms attributed to ʿAli ibn Abi Talib; in Twelver tradition ʿAli is the first Imam, while in the broader Sunni framing he is the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. He also left a celebrated Diwan of Arabic poetry and the work Khasais al-Aimma on the distinctive qualities of the Imams. The attribution of every passage in Nahj al-Balagha to ʿAli has been debated by later scholars, and the collection is read as al-Radi's editorial compilation rather than a single authored text.
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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.
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Al-Sharif al-Radi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.