Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi

Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (Kazerun, 1236 – Tabriz, 1311) was a thirteenth-century Persian scholar and poet whose work ranged over astronomy, mathematics, medicine, physics, music theory, philosophy and Sufism. He belongs to the Islamic tradition of Illuminationist philosophy, which grew out of Avicenna and Suhrawardi, and his writings show how Greek and Persian learning was transmitted, commented on and reshaped in the medieval Islamic world.

He was born into a family of physicians and Sufis. His father, Zia al-Din Mas'ud, practised medicine at the Mozaffari hospital in Shiraz, and Qutb al-Din began his studies with him. After his father's death, when he was fourteen, he took over his post as ophthalmologist at the same hospital and continued his training with teachers who knew Avicenna's Canon well. Around 1262 he moved to Maragha, where Nasir al-Din al-Tusi directed the observatory founded under Ilkhanid patronage. There he studied astronomy and helped prepare the Ilkhanid Tables, among the most important astronomical works of the age.

In the following decades he travelled through Persia, Anatolia and Syria. In Konya he served as judge in Sivas and Malatya and compiled works on grammar, rhetoric and law. In 1282 he was sent as envoy to the Mamluk sultan Qalawun in Egypt. His final teaching period was spent in Syria, and shortly before his death he settled in Tabriz, where he died in 1311.

In astronomy he proposed planetary models meant to improve on Ptolemy's principles, and he discussed the possibility of a heliocentric system. His best-known work, the Pearly Crown, is a Persian philosophical encyclopaedia covering natural science, theology, logic, ethics, mysticism and music. His commentary on Suhrawardi's Hikmat al-ishraq is perhaps his most influential philosophical contribution, since it systematised the philosophy of illumination and made it accessible to later generations of Persian thinkers.

His influence endured in the schools of Shiraz and Isfahan, where his commentaries were studied for centuries, and in the way later Islamic philosophy read Suhrawardi.