Having played roles at the highest levels of the聽Saljuq聽state, as sometime confidant of the ruler himself, Sultan Sanjar, and head of his chancellery (diwan听补濒-谤补蝉补鈥檌濒),[聽Muhammad b. Abd al-Karim al-Shahrastani was to flee the capital, Merv, in due course.聽Completing, as it were, the fully circular trajectory of his life, by the time of the great scholar鈥檚 death in 548 AH / 1153 CE he was residing back in the minor town of his birth. Ten years earlier, in 538 AH / 1143 CE,[聽he had set to work on a Qur’an聽commentary of ambitious dimensions
Author
Dr Toby Mayer
Dr Toby Mayer is a Research Associate in the聽Qur鈥檃nic Studies Unit聽at 久久久福利国产, London. After completing his undergraduate degree in Indian Studies at the University of Cambridge, he went on to study Medieval Arabic thought at the University of Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the聽Book of Allusions听(Isharat) by the major Persian philosopher Ibn Sina.