Author Biography and Ottoman Tafsir

Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Mustafa al-Imadi, known as Abu as-Su'ud Effendi or simply Abu as-Su'ud, was born in Mudurnu in Ottoman Anatolia in 896 AH (1490 CE). He came from a scholarly family — his father was a respected jurist and theologian — and received an extensive education in the Islamic sciences within the Ottoman madrasa system before rising to the summit of the Ottoman scholarly hierarchy.

Abu as-Su'ud served as Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire — the highest religious authority in the state — under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and Sultan Selim II for approximately thirty years, from 952 to 982 AH (1545–1574 CE). During this remarkable tenure, he exercised enormous influence over religious law, education, and public policy in the Ottoman state, issuing thousands of fatwas that shaped Ottoman legal practice across a wide range of questions.

His Quran commentary, Irshad al-Aql as-Salim ila Mazaya al-Kitab al-Karim (Guiding the Sound Intellect to the Merits of the Noble Book), typically called Tafsir Abu as-Su'ud or Tafsir al-Imadi, was composed during his tenure as Shaykh al-Islam and reflects the full maturity of his scholarship. It runs to approximately nine volumes in modern editions.

Irshad al-Aql as-Salim drew substantially on the two earlier tafsir works that had achieved canonical status in the Sunni tradition — al-Kashshaf by az-Zamakhshari and Anwar at-Tanzil by al-Baydawi — but expanded them with Abu as-Su'ud's own analysis, particularly in the domains of Arabic rhetoric and Hanafi jurisprudence. His commentary is celebrated for the beauty and clarity of its Arabic prose and for the depth of its rhetorical analysis.

He died in Constantinople in 982 AH (1574 CE), having served as Shaykh al-Islam under two sultans and produced a tafsir that became one of the most respected works of Quranic commentary in the Ottoman scholarly tradition.