Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi

Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (Mahmud ibn Mas'ud, 1236–1311 CE / 634–710 AH) was a Persian polymath of the Mongol Ilkhanid period, equally at home in philosophy, astronomy, and medicine. Sources report he was born into a family of physicians with Sufi ties — Sufism being the mystical, inward dimension of Islam. He trained first as a physician, reportedly working as an eye-doctor at a Shiraz hospital, before turning to philosophy and the mathematical sciences.

His decisive move was joining the celebrated observatory at Maragha (in present-day Iran), where he became the most prominent student of the great scholar Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. There he studied astronomy and produced non-Ptolemaic planetary models that interested later astronomers. He is best known, though, for his commentary on the Hikmat al-Ishraq ("Philosophy of Illumination") of al-Suhrawardi — the founding work of ishraqi (Illuminationist) philosophy, which holds that knowledge is a kind of inner "lighting-up" rather than logic alone. His commentary became the standard gateway to that school.

Restless and well-travelled, he spent time in Anatolia, studying with the mystic Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi at Konya, where tradition holds he met the poet Rumi. A local Ilkhanid governor appointed him judge (qadi) of Sivas and Malatya. In law he followed the Shafi'i school, one of Sunni Islam's four legal traditions. He died at Tabriz in 1311. Later scholars across Persia and the Ottoman lands drew on both his astronomy and his Illuminationist philosophy.