Zain al-Din al-'Iraqi

Zain al-Din al-Iraqi (1325-1403) was an Egyptian-Kurdish Islamic scholar of the Mamluk period, a jurist of the Shafii school and adherent of Ashari theology, described by contemporaries as the greatest hadith scholar of his age. He served as judge and prayer leader at the Prophet Mosque in Medina and later as judge in Mecca, and revived the practice of public hadith dictation, delivering 416 sessions over eleven years largely from memory. His best known work is the Alfiyya of al-Iraqi, a poem on hadith methodology, and his students included Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani.