Taqi al-Din al-Subki

'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Kafi al-Subki, known by the honorific epithet Taqi al-Din ("the godly one in religion"), was a Sunni scholar of the Mamluk period and one of the most influential jurists of the Shafi'i school of law (one of Sunni Islam's four legal traditions). According to the biographical sources he was born in 683 AH (1284 CE) in the Egyptian village of Subk, received his first instruction from his father, and then pursued advanced study in Cairo, where his teachers reportedly included the renowned jurist Ibn Daqiq al-'Id. He is said to have travelled to Alexandria, Syria and the Hijaz in pursuit of hadith (reports of the Prophet's words and deeds).

After a teaching career in Egypt, he was appointed chief qadi (judge) of Damascus in 739 AH (1338 CE), a post he held for roughly seventeen years while also preaching at the Umayyad Mosque and teaching at leading colleges. Falling ill near the end of his life, he was succeeded as judge by his son Taj al-Din al-Subki and returned to Cairo, where he died in 756 AH (1355 CE).

Al-Subki was a contemporary and pointed critic of Ibn Taymiyya. In works such as al-Sayf al-Saqil he defended devotional practices like tawassul (seeking intercession) and the broadly Ash'ari theology that he and many of his peers upheld; he is traditionally counted among the era's foremost mujtahids (jurists qualified to derive law independently). These were live disputes among Sunni scholars, presented here as positions, not verdicts.