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Al-Tha'labi

Al-Tha'labi

?–1035 CE · Nishapur

Abu Ishaq Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Tha'labi al-Nisaburi (d. 427 AH / 1035 CE) was a Sunni Qur'an exegete and scholar based in Nishapur, in the Khurasan region of eastern Iran. His exact year of birth is not recorded; he is generally placed in the mid-tenth century CE. He is best known for his extensive Qur'an commentary al-Kashf wa-l-Bayan 'an Tafsir al-Qur'an, an encyclopedic exegesis valued for its preservation of variant readings, philology, and earlier interpretive traditions, though later scholars criticized its inclusion of weak and unverified reports. He also compiled 'Ara'is al-Majalis fi Qisas al-Anbiya ("Stories of the Prophets"), one of the most influential works in that genre. He worked within the Shafi'i legal and Ash'ari theological milieu that flourished in Nishapur in his era.

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Nishapur

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About Nishapur

Nishapur (Naysabur), in the Khurasan region of northeastern Iran, was one of the four great cities of medieval Khurasan and a major centre of Shafi'i law, hadith, and Sufism. The hadith master Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875), compiler of the Sahih, was born and died there, and the Shi'i imam Ali al-Rida (d. 818) passed through it on his way to Tus.

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