al-Marghinani

Burhan al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Marghinani was a Sunni jurist of the Hanafi madhhab (one of the four classical Sunni schools of Islamic law) who worked in the Farghana valley of Transoxiana, in present-day Uzbekistan. He is remembered above all for one book: al-Hidaya ("The Guidance"), a concise manual of Hanafi law that he wrote as a commentary on his own earlier primer, Bidayat al-Mubtadi ("The Beginning of the Novice"). In the centuries after his death, al-Hidaya became the single most studied and most commented-upon Hanafi text, taught from Central Asia to the Ottoman lands and India, and later translated into English under British colonial rule for use in the courts.

His exact birth date is uncertain. Most reference works place his birth around 530 AH / 1135 CE in Marghinan, near Farghana; one tradition instead gives 8 Rajab 511 AH (about 1117 CE). His biographers report that he performed the hajj and visited Medina in 544 AH. He is generally said to have died on 14 Dhu al-Hijja 593 AH (29 October 1197) and to have been buried in Samarqand, though a minority report gives 596 AH.

Tradition traces his family's lineage back to the first caliph, Abu Bakr; this nasab (genealogical claim) is recorded by later biographers and cannot be independently confirmed. He is praised in the sources as learned in hadith, Qur'anic exegesis, and law alike.