Muhammad ibn Yusuf Atfayyish

Muhammad ibn Yusuf Atfayyish was the leading scholar of the Ibadi community of the Mzab, the cluster of oasis towns in the northern Algerian Sahara. (Ibadism is a distinct branch of Islam, neither Sunni nor Shia, today found mainly in Oman, the Mzab, Libya's Nafusa Mountains, and Djerba.) Within his community he is remembered above all by the honorific "Qutb al-A'imma" — roughly "axis of the imams," a title of esteem — which the Omani scholar Nur al-Din al-Salimi is reported to have given him.

His dates are not perfectly settled: sources place his birth between 1818 and 1821 CE (1236-1237 AH), in or near the Mzab town of Beni Isguen (Bani Yazgan). After his father died the family settled there, and tradition holds he memorized the Qur'an as a boy and opened his own teaching circle before the age of twenty, drawing students from across the Mzab, Ouargla, Djerba, and the Nafusa Mountains.

He is remembered as extraordinarily productive — biographical tradition credits him with roughly three hundred works spanning Qur'anic commentary (including the tafsir Himyan al-Zad), jurisprudence, theology, and grammar, though that figure is a traditional estimate. He maintained a wide correspondence with scholars and officials abroad. He is said to have made two pilgrimages to the holy cities, and he died in 1914, aged about ninety-six, in the town where he had taught.