Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi

Qutb al-Din Mahmud ibn Ziya al-Din Mas'ud ibn Muslih al-Shirazi (October 1236 - 1311) was a Persian polymath who made contributions to astronomy, mathematics, medicine, physics, music theory, philosophy and Sufism. ¹ He belonged to the Kazeruni family, distinguished for its physicians; he began medicine under his father at Shiraz's Mozaffari hospital, succeeded him there as ophthalmologist, then left medicine for study and travelled to Maragha, where he worked at Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's new observatory. ^{1 2} Later he served as judge of Sivas and Malatya, went as the Ilkhan Ahmad Takudar's envoy to the Mamluk sultan Qalawun in 1282, taught in Syria, and died at Tabriz. ¹

His father Ziya al-Din had received the khirqa, the Sufi investiture robe, from Shihab al-Din Umar al-Suhrawardi, and garbed his son with it as a blessing when the boy was ten; Qutb al-Din later received his own robe from the Sufi Najib al-Din Bozgush Shirazi. ¹ The Arabic article likewise states that he was born into a Sufi family and that his father gave him the khirqa at ten, and the Urdu article names the father's affiliation, the Kazeruniyya order, and repeats the investiture. ^{2 3} Attested initiation of this kind, in three independent texts, settles his recorded affiliation as Sufi; no legal school is named for him in any text read, and his commentary on a Maliki textbook of legal theory is scholarship on a book, not a school attested for the man. ^{1 2}

The English article, following the Encyclopaedia Iranica, gives his birth in October 1236 at Shiraz; the Arabic and Urdu articles give Kazerun, his family's town of origin, and the variant is preserved in his record rather than silently resolved. ^{1 2 3} At Maragha he studied Avicenna's al-Isharat and astronomy under Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, with whom he worked on completing the new astronomical tables. ^{1 2} He died at Tabriz in 1311 — 710 AH in the Arabic article — and was buried in the city's Charandab cemetery. ^{1 2 4}