SUYUTI, AS-

born 1445, Cairo, Egypt died Oct. 17, 1505, Cairo in full Abu Al-fadl 'abd Ar-rahman Ibn Abi Bakr Jalal Ad-din As-suyuti Egyptian writer and teacher whose works deal with a wide variety of subjects, the Islamic religious sciences predominating. The son of a judge, As-Suyuti was tutored by a Sufi (Muslim mystic) friend of his father. He was precocious and was already a teacher in 1462. In 1486 he was appointed to a chair in the mosque of Baybars in Cairo. When in 1501 he tried to reduce the stipends of Sufi scholars at the mosque, a revolt broke out, and As-Suyuti was nearly killed. After his trial, he was placed under house arrest on the island of Rawda (near Cairo). He worked there in seclusion until his death. As-Suyuti's works number at least 300; many are mere booklets, and others are encyclopaedic. He was coauthor of Tafsir al-Jalalayn (Commentary of the Two Jalals), a word-by-word commentary on the Qur'an, the first part of which was written by Jalal Ad-Din al-Mahalli. His Itqan fi'ulum al-Qur'an (Mastery in the Sciences of the Qur'an) is a well-known work on Qur'anic exegesis. Ta'rikh al-khulafa' (History of the Caliphs) is one of the few works of As-Suyuti to have been translated into English. As-Suyuti was a compiler of genius rather than an original writer, but it is precisely his ability to select and abridge that makes the books useful. This faculty characterizes his most important philological work, Al-Muzhir fi'ulum al-lughah (Guide to the Sciences of Language), a linguistic encyclopaedia covering such topics as the history of the Arabic language, phonetics, semantics, and morphology. It was largely derived from the works of two predecessors, Ibn Jinni and Ibn Faris.