Shaykh Tusi, full name Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi, known as Shaykh al-Ta'ifah was a Persian scholar of the Twelver school of Shia Islam.
19 Facts About Shaykh Tusi
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Shaykh Tusi is the author of two of the Four Books of hadith; namely, Tahdhib al-Ahkam and al-Istibsar, and is believed to have founded the Hawza of Najaf.
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Shaykh Tusi was born 995 AD in Tus, Iran, and by 1018 AD he was living under the rule of the Buyid dynasty.
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Shaykh Tusi started his education in Tus, where he mastered many of the Islamic sciences of that period.
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Shaykh Tusi later studied in Baghdad, which was taken by Tughril-bek in 1055 AD.
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Shaykh Tusi started writing some of his earlier works in his twenties.
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Shaykh Tusi had an important role in the formation and revival of Shia jurisprudence and law, as his life coincided with the burning of books and libraries.
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Shaykh Tusi defended the application of jurisprudence in respect to religious laws.
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Shaykh Tusi's dominance was unrivaled for a long time and nearly all Islamic jurisprudence was affected by Tusi's opinions.
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Some of Shaykh Tusi's works show that he was influenced by precedent jurists like Sallar Deylami.
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Shaykh Tusi's influence persisted until Ibn Idris Hilli, who criticized some of Shaykh Tusi's views.
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Shaykh Tusi produced biographies, traditions, and compendia of knowledge.
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Shaykh Tusi started developments that allowed Shia clerics to assume some of the roles previously permitted to only imams, such as collecting and distributing religious taxes, and organizing Friday prayers.
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In conflict between the Akhbari and Usuli schools, Shaykh Tusi defended the Usuli and claimed that the rival Akhbari were literalists.
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Shaykh Tusi believed in principles of jurisprudence as the fundamental knowledge in acquiring judgment in Islam, and wrote in the introduction to one of his works:.
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Shaykh Tusi compared the positions of the different legal schools of Islam and showed that there is little difference between them.
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Shaykh Tusi's emphasis was on the rational dimension of religion, underlining that principles like the commandment to good and prohibition of evil are indispensable according to reason.
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Shaykh Tusi used rational arguments to validate consensus as derived from the principle of lutf.
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Shaykh Tusi wrote over fifty works in different Islamic branches of knowledge such as philosophy, hadith, theology, biography, historiography, exegesis, and tradition.