Matn Minhaj Wusul
Tabriz · 1292
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al-Baydawi
al-Baydawi
?–1292 CE · Shiraz
Nasir al-Din Abu al-Khayr Abd Allah ibn Umar al-Baydawi (often simply "al-Qadi al-Baydawi," the Judge of Bayda) was a Persian jurist, theologian, and Qur'an commentator of the 13th century. His nisba comes from Bayda, a small town in the Fars region of southern Iran. He belonged to the Shafi'i school of law (madhhab) and the Ash'ari school of theology (kalam), and trained within a family of judges: biographical tradition reports that his father served as a chief judge (qadi) of Fars, an office al-Baydawi himself is said to have held, based in the provincial capital, Shiraz.
In later life he moved to Tabriz, then a major center of the Mongol Ilkhanid realm, where he is reported to have died. Later biographical tradition also links him to the Sufi shaykh Muhammad al-Kunjani of Tabriz; how close that tie was is uncertain.
His fame rests almost entirely on one book: Anwar al-Tanzil wa-Asrar al-Ta'wil ("The Lights of Revelation and the Secrets of Interpretation"). It is a concise, polished commentary on the Qur'an that drew heavily on the celebrated commentary (al-Kashshaf) of al-Zamakhshari, a Mu'tazili scholar, while quietly setting aside the theological positions Sunni readers rejected. Its brevity and balance of grammar, law, and doctrine made it the most widely taught Qur'an commentary in Sunni madrasas for centuries; scholars still call him simply "the Judge." His date of death is genuinely disputed: 685 AH (1286), 691 AH (1292), 716 AH (1317), and 719 AH (1319) are all reported and argued by different scholars, and even his place of death (Tabriz vs. an older Shiraz tradition) is not fully settled.
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Stop 2 of 2Qadi
ShirazPersia / Iran — south
What they did here
Biographical tradition reports that he served as judge (qadi) of Fars, an office based in Shiraz, the provincial capital, succeeding his father, who is said to have been a chief judge of Fars. (Some later manaqib instead have him decline the post on a Sufi guide's advice.) It was within this Shafi'i-Ash'ari scholarly milieu that his career as a jurist and commentator took shape.
About Shiraz
Shiraz, in the Fars province of southern Iran, is the historic capital of the Fars region and a celebrated centre of Persian poetry and philosophy. The poet Hafiz (d. c. 1390) lived and is buried there, and the philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), founder of the 'transcendent theosophy' school, was born and taught in the city; the philosopher Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311) also took his nisba from it.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Baydawi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.