Murtada al-Zabidi
Muslim polymath
Al-Murtaḍá al-Husaynī al-Zabīdī (Arabic: المرتضى الحسيني الزبيدي), or Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Murtaḍá al-Zabīdī (1732–1790 / 1145–1205 AH), also known as Murtada al-Zabidi, was an Indian Sunni polymath based in Cairo. He was a Hanafi scholar, hadith specialist, philologist, linguist, lexicographer, genealogist, biographer, historian, mystic and theologian. He was considered one of the leading intellectuals of the 18th century. He was also regarded as the greatest Hadith scholar of his time and one of the foremost philologists of the Arab post-classical era.
Biography
Murtaḍá was born in 1732 (1145AH) in Bilgram, Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh, India. His family originated from Wasit in Iraq, from where his parents had emigrated to the Hadramawt region in the east of Yemen – where the Husaynī tribe is situated. Murtaḍá earned his nisba 'al-Zabīdī' from Zabīd in the south western coastal plains of Yemen, which was a centre of academic learning where he had spent time studying. He began studying Hadith in Delhi under the most prominent scholar of his time, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi. He travelled to Hejaz (Jeddah, Mecca and Madinah) and then settled in Egypt. He was renowned in the Islamic world.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4120098. VIAF identifies the subject as 90055027. The Library of Congress control number is n84017058. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1732, 1790, 1145 and 1205.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murtada al-Zabidi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.