al-Shatibi (al-Qasim ibn Firruh)

Al-Qasim ibn Firruh ibn Khalaf al-Ru'ayni al-Shatibi (538-590 AH / c. 1143/1144-1194 CE) was a scholar of qira'at — the disciplined variant readings in which the Qur'an is recited — whose name is attached to one of the most widely memorized texts in Islamic learning. He was born in Jativa (Arabic Shatiba), in the Valencia region of Muslim Spain; sources convert his birth year of 538 AH variously to 1143 or 1144 CE. Biographical tradition reports that he was blind, in some accounts from birth. He studied hadith (reports of the Prophet's words and deeds) and Arabic in Valencia; sources name the scholar Ibn Hudhayl among his teachers, though one modern study instead names Abd Allah al-Nafzi as his teacher in the readings.

In the 570s AH (1170s CE) he left al-Andalus for the Islamic East, settling first at Alexandria, where he is reported to have studied with the celebrated hadith master Abu Tahir al-Silafi. He then moved to Cairo. There the powerful secretary-statesman al-Qadi al-Fadil, a close associate of Saladin, appointed him to teach Qur'anic recitation, grammar, and philology at the school al-Fadil had founded, the Fadiliyya.

Al-Shatibi's lasting achievement is the poem Hirz al-Amani wa-wajh al-tahani, universally called the Shatibiyya: a versification of about 1,170 verses of al-Dani's prose manual al-Taysir, condensing the seven readings into a memorizable rhyme. It became the foundational text of qira'at study, drawing centuries of commentary. He is reported to have died in Cairo in 590 AH (1194 CE) and to have been buried in the Qarafa cemetery, traditionally said to be near al-Qadi al-Fadil.