al-Āmidī, Sayf al-Dīn - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Weiss, Bernard G.
Leiden
Brill
(1,340 words)
Sayf al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Abī ʿAlī al-Āmidī (551-631/1156-1233) was a leading scholar of Islamic theology (kalām) and theoretical jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh) . He was born to a Kurdish family in Āmid, a largely Kurdish town in eastern Anatolia that is now part of the city of Diyarbakır. According to al-Qifṭī, al-Āmidī studied Shāfiʿī law under scholars of his native village (al-Qifṭī, 241), although al-Subkī says that he committed a Ḥanbalī handbook to memory (al-Subkī, 8:306). At age fourteen, he