Mabsut
Bukhara · 1090
a
al-Sarakhsi
al-Sarakhsi
?–1090 CE · Sarakhs
Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Sarakhsi, known by the honorific title Shams al-A'imma ("Sun of the Imams"), was one of the most influential jurists of the Hanafi school — one of the four classical schools (madhhabs) of Sunni Islamic law. His birth name links him to Sarakhs, a town in the Khurasan region on the present-day Iran–Turkmenistan border, though his exact birth year is not securely recorded. He studied in Bukhara under the Hanafi authority Abd al-Aziz al-Halwani.
He is remembered above all for al-Mabsut ("The Extensive"), a vast thirty-volume work of jurisprudence (fiqh) that became a foundational reference for the school. According to a widely repeated tradition, al-Sarakhsi composed much of it while imprisoned in a well (jubb) at Uzgen, in the Farghana valley, after offending a Qarakhanid ruler over a legal opinion. As the story goes, his students gathered at the mouth of the pit while he dictated from memory, having no books to hand. How much of this vivid account is historically secure, versus later biographical embellishment, is difficult to determine.
His other works include a treatise on legal theory (usul al-fiqh) and a commentary on al-Shaybani's manual of international and military law. Sources disagree on when he died: many give 483 AH (1090 CE), others around 490 AH (1096 CE). The place of his death — Uzgen or elsewhere in Farghana — is likewise uncertain.
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Sarakhs
What they did here
His nisba (place-name) al-Sarakhsi ties him to Sarakhs, a town in Khurasan on the modern Iran–Turkmenistan border. Reference works (EI2; Wikipedia summarizing the classical tabaqat) name it as his origin. His birth year is not securely recorded; a modern estimate of c.1009 CE circulates but is not firmly attested.
About Sarakhs
Sarakhs, on the border of present-day Iran and Turkmenistan in the historic region of Khurasan, was a town on the road between Nishapur and Merv. The Hanafi jurist al-Sarakhsi (d. c. 1096), author of the major legal compendium al-Mabsut, which he is said to have dictated from prison, took his nisba from the town.
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