Ali al-Qari

Nur ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sultan Muhammad al-Hirawi al-Qari (Arabic: نور الدين أبو الحسن علي بن سلطان محمد الهروي القاري‎; d. 1605/1606), known as Mulla Ali al-Qari (ملا علي القاري) was an Islamic scholar.

First page of Content of Handschrift Landberg 295 in the Berlin State Library, which has a large collection of al-Qari's work

He was born in Herat, where he received his basic Islamic education. Thereafter, he traveled to Mecca and studied under the scholar Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Haytami Makki, and al-Qari eventually decided to remain in Mecca where he taught, died and was buried.

He is considered in Hanafi circles [1] to be one of the masters of hadith and imams of fiqh, Qur'anic commentary, language, history and tasawwuf. He was a hafiz (memorizer of the Quran) and a famous calligrapher who wrote a Quran by hand every year.

Al-Qari wrote several books, including the commentary al-Mirqat on Mishkat al-Masabih in several volumes, a two-volume commentary on Qadi Ayyad's Ash-Shifa,[4] a commentary on the Shama'il al-Tirmidhi, and a two-volume commentary on Al-Ghazali's abridgment of the Ihya Ulum ad-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) entitled `Ayn al-`Ilm wa Zayn al-Hilm (The spring of knowledge and the adornment of understanding). He also wrote Daw' al-Ma'ali Sharh Bad' al-Amali (Arabic: ضوء المعالي شرح بدء الأمالي‎), an exposition of Qasida Bad' al-Amali by Siraj al-Din al-Ushi.[2][5]

His most popular work is a collection of prayers (dua), taken from the Quran and the Hadith, called Hizb ul-Azam.[6] The collection is divided into seven chapters, giving one chapter for each day of the week. This work is sometimes found in a collection with the Dalail al-Khayrat.