The article is a study of a fragment from the Arabic manuscript source “Wafiyyat al-aslaf wa tahiy-yat al-akhlaf” from the heritage of a Tatar theologian and 19th-century historian Shihab al-Din al-Marjani (Shigabutdin Marjani). The fragment is dedicated to the biography of a Shafi’i faqih Zakar-iyya al-Ansari (d. 926/1520), the supreme judge of Egypt of the Mamluk era, awarded the honorary title “Shaykh al-Islam”. Based on the manuscript from the collection of the academic library of Ka-zan Federal University, the Arabic text of al-Ansari’s biography was restored in modern orthography and then translated into Russian with comments and a brief analysis in the historical and theological context. Tatar theologian Shihab al-Din al-Marjani provides the basic information about the life and contribution of Sheikh al-Islam Zakariyya al-Ansari to Islamic sciences and emphasizes that he was one of the renovators of the Islamic faith (mujaddid) of his era. The authors of the article, on the one hand, tried to fill a gap in domestic Islamic studies regarding information about the outstanding Shafi’i jurist Zakariyya al-Ansari; on the other hand, they pointed out the importance of studying and translating a unique domestic manuscript source on the history of Islam – the biographical dic-tionary “Wafiyyat al-aslaf wa tahiyyat al-akhlaf” by Shihab al-Din al-Marjani, which has not yet been published or translated in full. For the first time, a fragment from this source with translation is introduced into scholarly discourse.
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