al-Suyuti

Jalal al-Din Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr al-Suyuti (born 849 AH / 1445 CE in Cairo; died 911 AH / 1505 CE) was one of the most prolific scholars of the late Mamluk period. His family name "al-Suyuti" comes from Asyut in Upper Egypt, where his forebears had settled. His father, a Shafi'i jurist who taught in Cairo, died when al-Suyuti was a small child, and he was raised and educated in the city. He is traditionally said to have memorized the Qur'an by about age eight and later to have studied with a large number of teachers.

Al-Suyuti taught Shafi'i law (one of the four main Sunni legal schools) and the science of hadith — the critical study of reports about the Prophet Muhammad. He worked at several Cairene mosques and Sufi lodges, including, from 1486, the Khanqah of Baybars, a post he later lost amid disputes with rival scholars. He claimed to have attained the rank of mujtahid (an independent legal reasoner), a claim his contemporary al-Sakhawi sharply contested; the matter remains debated.

After a quarrel over the lodge's finances, he withdrew (around 1501) to a residence on Rawda island in the Nile, living in seclusion and writing until his death. His hundreds of works include the hadith manual Tadrib al-Rawi (expanding al-Nawawi's primer) and the collection al-Jami' al-Saghir, and he completed the Qur'an commentary Tafsir al-Jalalayn begun by al-Mahalli.