Author Biography and Popular Tafsir

Ala ad-Din Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Baghdadi Al-Shafi'i, known as al-Khazin (The Treasurer), was born in Baghdad around 678 AH (1279 CE). His epithet 'al-Khazin' derived from his position as the librarian (khazin al-kutub) of the Dauliyya zawiyah in Aleppo, Syria, a position he held for many years before returning to Baghdad later in life.

Al-Khazin studied the Islamic sciences in Baghdad and then in Syria, where he settled for an extended period. He was a Shafi'i jurist and belonged to the Sufi Qadiri order, which gave his scholarship a combination of legal rigor and spiritual orientation characteristic of many scholars of his era. He transmitted from major scholars of his time and was regarded as a reliable transmitter of religious knowledge.

His tafsir, Lubab at-Ta'wil fi Ma'ani at-Tanzil (The Core of Interpretation in the Meanings of Revelation), commonly called Tafsir al-Khazin, was completed in the early eighth Islamic century and achieved wide popularity across the Arab-speaking Islamic world. It runs to approximately four volumes in modern editions.

Tafsir al-Khazin draws heavily on the earlier tafsir tradition, particularly on the works of al-Baghawi (Ma'alim at-Tanzil) and az-Zamakhshari (Al-Kashshaf). Al-Khazin reorganized and supplemented this material, adding narrative content, pious stories, and traditions of virtue that contributed to the work's popularity among general readers as well as students of the Islamic sciences. The work was widely read in mosques and homes, not only in madrasas, because of its accessible combination of scholarship and devotional richness.

This popularity came with scholarly criticism: later hadith critics, most notably Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani and others, noted that Tafsir al-Khazin contained numerous weak and fabricated narrations, particularly in its sections on the virtues of Quranic surahs and its narrative elaborations of prophetic stories. Al-Khazin had followed the common practice of his era in including transmitted material without rigorous hadith criticism.

He died in Baghdad in 741 AH (1341 CE), leaving behind a tafsir that has been one of the most widely read in the Arab world for nearly seven centuries.