Al-Fakhr al-Razi (543-606 A.H)

Muhammad ibn `Umar ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Husayn Abu `Abd Allah al-Qurashi, al-Bakri, al-Taymi, al-Tabaristani al-Shafi`i, known as Ibn al-Khatib and as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (543-606), Shaykh al-Islam, the imam of the learned scholars of kalam and the foundations of belief, a major jurist of the Shafi`i school, specialist of usul, Sufi, commentator of the Qur'an, philologist, genealogist, heresiographer, logician, and physician.

The principal spokesman of Ahl al-Sunna in his time. He began his scholarly career in poverty and died at sixty-three.

Al-Tafsir al-Kabir, also known as Mafatih al-Ghayb, among the greatest commentaries of Qur'an in Islam, in twelve to thirty volumes depending on the edition, he spent the last fifteen years of his life working on it and did not finish it.

Ibn al-Subki quotes the following lines of poetry from Imam al-Razi:

The daring of minds ends in shackles, Most of mankind's undertakings are folly. Our souls are indifferent to what our bodies do, And the sum of our lives is affliction and harm. We did not benefit from our lifelong search Except in collecting what these said, and those.

Al-Razi is, with al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi, among those to whom Shaykh Muhyi al-Din Ibn `Arabi frequently refers in his books:

Ibn al-Subki, Tabaqat al-Shafi`iyya al-Kubra; Ibn Qadi Shuhba, Tabaqat al-Shafi`iyya.