al-Taftazani

Sa'd al-Din Mas'ud ibn 'Umar al-Taftazani (722/1322 - 793/1390) was a scholar from Khurasan, in the eastern Islamic world, remembered as one of the most influential teachers of the post-classical Sunni madrasa (religious college) curriculum. He is named for Taftazan, a village in the region of Nasa, and is reported to have studied across a string of Khurasanian and Central Asian towns. Sources commonly name 'Adud al-Din al-Iji, a leading theologian of the age, among his teachers, though the details of his early itinerary are thinly documented.

Al-Taftazani wrote across many fields - grammar, rhetoric (balagha, the art of eloquent expression), logic, jurisprudence, Qur'an exegesis, and above all kalam (speculative or rational theology). His commentaries became teaching standards for centuries: his Sharh al-'Aqa'id al-Nasafiyya, a gloss on al-Nasafi's short creed, and his Sharh al-Maqasid, a comprehensive theological summa, were copied and taught from Anatolia to India.

He spent his later years at Samarqand under the patronage of Timur (Tamerlane). Tradition reports a celebrated scholarly rivalry with the younger al-Sharif al-Jurjani, who came to be favoured at court. Where exactly al-Taftazani stood between the two main Sunni theological schools - the Ash'ari and the Maturidi - and between the Hanafi and Shafi'i legal schools, is debated by scholars and his own works are read both ways. He died at Samarqand and is traditionally said to have been buried at Sarakhs.