Sharh Cadud
Sultaniyya · 1355
a
al-Iji
al-Iji
c. 1281 CE–c. 1355 CE · Tabriz
Adud al-Din Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad al-Iji (c. 680/1281 - 756/1355) was a Sunni theologian, judge, and scholar of the rational sciences who worked under the Mongol Ilkhanid rulers of Persia. He took his name from Ij (also spelled Ig), a town near Shiraz in the Fars region, where he was born into a family of notables and judges. As a young man he studied in Tabriz, then the Ilkhanid capital, learning grammar and the "rational sciences" (logic, theology, and philosophy as taught in the madrasa). He gained the patronage of the powerful vizier Rashid al-Din Hamadani and taught and served as a judge at the new capital, Sultaniyya.
Al-Iji rose to be chief judge (qadi) of the Ilkhanid realm, and after the dynasty's collapse he settled in Shiraz under the local ruler Abu Ishaq Inju, becoming chief judge there.
He is remembered above all for al-Mawaqif fi ilm al-kalam ("The Stations in the science of theology"), a concise summa of Ash'ari kalam - the school of reasoned Sunni theology founded by al-Ash'ari. Through later commentaries, especially al-Jurjani's, the Mawaqif became a core teaching text in madrasas for centuries.
When Abu Ishaq fell and the rival ruler Mubariz al-Din took Shiraz, al-Iji was imprisoned in a fortress near his home town, where he died around 756/1355. Reports of the exact year and circumstances vary.
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Stop 1 of 3Studying
Tabriz
What they did here
In his early years he moved to Tabriz, the Ilkhanid capital, where he is reported to have studied grammar and the rational sciences (logic, kalam, falsafa). Sources name his teacher as Fakhr al-Din al-Jarbadaqani, himself a pupil of al-Baydawi; some accounts also link him to Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi. The dates of his stay are not recorded.
About Tabriz
Tabriz, in Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran, was a major commercial city and at times a capital under the Ilkhanid Mongols and the Aq Qoyunlu and early Safavids. The Qur'an commentator al-Baydawi (d. c. 1286), author of the widely studied Anwar al-Tanzil, served as qadi in the city; the philosopher Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i (d. 1981) was born nearby and took the nisba Tabrizi.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Iji’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.