Quṭb al‐Dīn Maḥmūd ibn Mas˓ūd al‐Shīrāzī (1236–1311) was a Persian scientist and philosopher. He was born into a medical family in Shiraz in central Iran. His father was a staff physician and ophthalmologist at the newly established MuẒaffarī hospital. As a child he was the apprentice of his father, who died when Shīrāzī was 14. Having assumed his father's position at the hospital, he continued his studies with several other local teachers of medicine and the rational and religious sciences. At this time he began the study of the first book, al‐Kullīyāt (On General Principles) of Ibn Sīnā's Qānūn fī ‘l‐ṭibb (Canon of Medicine), the leading medical textbook of the Middle Ages. His father had also initiated him into the Suhrawardī order of Sufis (Islamic mystics).
By the time he reached adulthood, he was in need of advanced medical instruction that could not be provided by the teachers of a provincial city like Shiraz. It would have been normal for him to have gone off earlier to one of...
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References
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Quṭb al‐Dīn Shīrāzī. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. IX. Ed. Charles Gillispie. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975. 247–53.
Saliba, George. A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden Age of Islam. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Shīrāzī, Quṭb al‐Dīn. Sharḥ ḥikmat al‐Ishrāq. Tehran: 1895–97.
Shīrāzī, Quṭb al‐Dīn. Durrat al‐Tāj li‐Ghurrat al‐Dubāj. Tehran: Majlis, 1938–45.
Varjāvand, Parvīz. Kāvush‐i Raṣd‐khāna‐i Marāgha (Excavation of the Marāgha Observatory). Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1987.
Walbridge, John. The Science of Mystic Lights: Qutb al‐Dīn Shīrāzī and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Center for Middle East Studies, 1992.
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Walbridge, J. (2008). Al‐Shīrāzī. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9327
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