JURJANI, AL-

in full 'ali Ibn Muhammad Al-jurjani, also called As-sayyid Ash-sharif born 1339, Taju, near Astarabad, Iran died 1413, Shiraz leading traditionalist theologian of 15th-century Iran. Jurjani received a varied education, first in Harat and then in Egypt. He visited Constantinople in 1374, and, upon his return in 1377, he was given a teaching appointment in Shiraz. In 1387 Shiraz fell to Timur, the famous central Asian conqueror, and Jurjani, whose fame as a teacher and scholar had reached its height, was taken to Timur's capital of Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan). He stayed in Samarkand until Timur's death in 1405, when he returned to Shiraz. Most of Jurjani's scholarly work was written in Arabic. Of his 31 extant works and commentaries, the best-known work is the Kitab at-ta'rifat (Book of Definitions), a short dictionary of technical terms from theology, philosophy, and philology (first edited by G. Flgel in 1845).