Al-Sarakhsi

Al-Sarakhsi, known in full as Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Abi Sahl Abu Bakr al-Sarakhsi, was an eleventh century Sunni Muslim jurist of the Hanafi school born in the city of Sarakhs in Greater Khorasan, who died in either 1090 or 1096. He earned the honorific Shams al-Aimma, the Sun of the Leaders, and became so respected within the Hanafi school that a saying arose urging jurists, when in doubt, to follow Sarakhsi. He spent roughly fifteen years imprisoned after criticizing a ruler's marriage to a slave woman on juristic grounds, and it was during this imprisonment, dictating from memory, that he composed his most important work, Al-Mabsut, a wide ranging compendium of Hanafi law that remained an influential reference within the school until the nineteenth century.