al-Sanusi

Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Sanusi was a scholar of Tlemcen, in the western Maghreb (today's Algeria). Sources place his birth around 830 AH / 1426 CE (some reckonings give 832/1428) and date his death precisely to 18 Jumada II 895 AH / 10 May 1490; the variation in his birth year and reported age at death is unresolved.

He worked in three overlapping fields. In law he followed the Maliki madhhab (one of Sunni Islam's four legal schools); in creed he was an Ash'ari, the rationalist theological school of kalam (systematic theology); and he was a practising Sufi who, tradition reports, received the khirqa (the initiate's cloak) from the master Ibrahim al-Tazi. He is said to have kept his distance from the ruling Banu Zayyan dynasty, living as a teacher and mufti among the scholars and Sufis of the city.

His lasting fame rests on his graded statements of belief — a longer, middle, and short creed. The shortest, al-Aqida al-Sughra, became universally known as Umm al-Barahin ("the Mother of Proofs"). Built around the necessary, impossible, and possible attributes of God and framed with logical proofs, it spread as a teaching text far beyond the Maghreb — into West Africa and the Malay world — and remains in use. Among his roughly four to five dozen attributed works, this short creed made his name a fixture of Sunni religious education.