al-Mundhiri

Zaki al-Din Abu Muhammad Abd al-Azim ibn Abd al-Qawi al-Mundhiri (581-656 AH / 1185-1258 CE) was a leading Sunni hadith scholar of Egypt during the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods. Of Syrian descent but born in Fustat (Old Cairo), he is remembered in the biographical tradition as the foremost muhaddith (hadith specialist) of his generation. He followed the Shafi'i madhhab (school of law); biographers also describe him as Ash'ari in creed (a Sunni theological school), though such labels reflect later classification as much as his own self-description.

Tradition reports that he began studying hadith around the age of ten and travelled widely to "hear" hadith directly from leading transmitters — visiting the Hijaz (Mecca and Medina), Syria (Damascus and the Jazira region), and Egyptian centres such as Alexandria. His most important teacher is named as the hadith master Ibn al-Mufaddal in Egypt.

He is best known for al-Targhib wa al-Tarhib ("Encouragement and Warning"), a widely circulated topical collection of hadith on the rewards of good deeds and warnings against bad ones, and for abridgments (mukhtasar) of Sahih Muslim and Sunan Abi Dawud — two of the canonical Sunni hadith collections. For roughly two decades he headed the Dar al-Hadith al-Kamiliyya, a hadith college in Cairo, where he also died. He was buried in the Qarafa cemetery. Among the scholars who studied with him was the celebrated jurist Ibn Daqiq al-Id.