Muhammad Aala al-Thanawi
- Died
- 1191 AH
- Born in
- -
Muhammad Aala al-Thanawi (d. after 1158 AH / 1745 CE) was an Indian Hanafi jurist, scholar, and judge, best known for his encyclopedic dictionary of scientific and religious terminology, Kashshaf Istilahat al-Funun.
Lineage and Early Life
His full name was Muhammad Aala ibn Ali ibn Qadi Muhammad Hamid ibn Muhammad Sabir al-Umari al-Farooqi al-Thanawi. Some biographical entries, including that by Butrus al-Bustani in his encyclopedia, refer to him simply as Muhammad Ali or Muhammad ibn Ali al-Thanawi. His lineage traced back to the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab. While the exact date of his birth is unrecorded, historians estimate he was born in the late 11th century AH during the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir.
Al-Thanawi was raised in an educated household. He studied Arabic grammar, linguistics, and Hanafi jurisprudence directly under his father, Ali. When he found limited opportunity to pursue the rational and philosophical sciences (al-ulum al-hikmiyya) under formal instructors, he collected a substantial private library and dedicated a large period of his life to independent study and deep reading across those disciplines.
Career and Scholarly Contribution
Al-Thanawi served as a judge (qadi) in the town of Thana during the reign of Alamgir, and his personal signet ring was engraved with the title Khadim Shar' Qadi Muhammad Aala ("Servant of the Sacred Law, Judge Muhammad Aala").
Recognizing the difficulty students faced in comprehending specialized technical terminology across disparate fields of knowledge, he composed his monumental work Kashshaf Istilahat al-Funun wa al-Ulum ("The Revealer of Technical Terms of the Arts and Sciences"), completing its drafting in 1158 AH (1745 CE). He structured the reference work into two main divisions—one for Arabic terminology and another for Persian expressions—following an extensive introduction that categorized the rational, traditional, theoretical, and practical sciences. In addition to this lexicon, he authored a treatise on Quranic text arrangement titled Sabq al-Ghayat fi Nasaq al-Ayat.
Death and Burial
The precise year of al-Thanawi's death is not preserved in early biographical sources, which document only that he completed his principal work in 1158 AH. Later records also place his death around 1191 AH (1777 CE). He was buried in the town of Thana. Scholars of the region later recounted that students who studied complex scholarly texts at his gravesite would find intricate meanings clarified to them.
Answer updated
List of Works
Kashshaf Istilahat al-Funun wa al-Ulum is an encyclopedic dictionary of technical terminology completed in 1158 AH (1745 CE). It defines and contextualizes technical terms across the Islamic traditional, linguistic, and rational sciences, gathering specialized vocabulary from diverse fields into a single reference work.