ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh al-Bahāʾī al-Ghuzūlī (d. 815/1411-2) was a literary figure of the Mamlūk period. Born possibly in the 770s/1370s, he was a mamlūk turkī, that is, a slave brought from Central Asia or some indeterminate region of Europe, "afflicted with a non-Arab manner of expression and a foreign accent," as he describes himself ( Maṭāliʿ , Cairo 2000, 642). The nisba al-Bahāʾī suggests that he was bought and manumitted by a certain Bahāʾ al-Dīn, perhaps the Damascene poet and ḥadīth