ABSTRACT
The great Egyptian polymath Abe ’l-Faql ‘Abd al-Rarman b. Abc Bakr b. Murammad Jalal al-Dcn al-Suyeuc al-Khudayrc (849/1445-911/1505)1 was one of the leading scholars of his day, famous for his wide knowledge, as well as his contempt for contemporary scholars.2 His work is significant, not simply because of his historical context, writing at the end of the classical period, but because his astonishingly prolific output covered many different subjects: from linguistics and philology to history, medicine, cosmology and zoology.3 Al-Suyeuc was well respected in his own lifetime, although to a lesser degree in Egypt, and specifically Cairo, because of his arrogant demeanour,4 and there is evidence of his influence stretching from Takrer in East Africa,5 all the way to India.6 Indeed, he became a dominant force in the study of RadCth in the following centuries, with, as John O. Voll has noted, the vast majority of RadCth collections being based on the authority of three scholars: al-Suyeuc, Ibn lajar al-‘Asqalanc (d. 852/1449), and Zakariyya al-Antarc (d. 926/1520).7
