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Uzbekistan: a land multifarious geniuses. MAHMUD IBN ZAYD AL-LOMISHI (1049-1128)

As has been mentioned above, lots of great people and geniuses in the fields of law, hadith, tafsir and kalam were educated in our country in the Middle Ages and they became famous throughout the world for their wide-scale scientific heritages, and this fact fills our souls with great and worthy pride. Thanks to the possibilities provided by our independence, a series of investigations are being carried out on their lives and scientific careers. However, there are still a great amount of research works and investigations that should be carried by our scholars in this field. It should be noted that interest to the scientific heritage of our ancestors is increasing even in foreign countries. As a proof of this idea, we can present the investigation on the life and scientific career of a scholar from the village Lomish of Fergana region Mahmud ibn Zayd al-Lomishi.

According to the information presented by the historical sources, the village Lomish was a birthplace of many well-known scholars who created their scientific works under the penname “al-Lomishi” and two of them became veiy famous throughout the Islamic world as lawyers and experts in the science of Hadiths.

One of them was Abu as-Sana Mahmud ibn Zayd al-Lomishi who was a famous lawyer in the field of law of the Hanafian order and an expert in the science of kalam. The second one, al-Husain ibn Ali ibn Abulqasim Imaduddin al-Lomishi was a great expert in the science of Hadiths. He was born in 441/1049 in the village ol Lomish and died in Samarkand in the month of Ramadan 522/1128. Both of them had a penname “al-Lomishi” and created their works under this penname. Therefore, sometimes specialists studying their scientific heritage may confuse the m because they were born and lived in the same place and period.

Mahmud ibn Zayd al-Lomishi about whom we are going to speak was born, as has been mentioned above, in the village of Lomish in Fergana. Nevertheless, the written sources tell us very little about his personal life. Even his date of birth and date of death were not been mentioned there. We have very scant information saying that Mahmud ibn Zayd al-Lomishi lived at the end of the 11th and at the beginning of the 12th centuries. Though we have very little information about his personal life and biography, we have satisfactory information which gives us a possibility of speaking about his two manuscripts preserved in the Sulaymaniya library of Istanbul.

Doctor Abdulmajid Turki, the head of the department of scientific researches of the national centre of scientific researches in Paris, came across the two famous books of Mahmud ibn Zayd al-Lomishi. One of the manuscripts “Kitab at-tamhiyd li-qavaid at-Tawhid” (A Manual on the Rules of Acknowledging the Unity of Allah) was a book devoted to the problems of religion, its main principles and uniqueness of Allah. The first page of the book says lhat the author is “al-Imam, al-allama Sheikh ul-Islam al-Lomishi”. The second manuscript was titled as “Kitab fi usul al-fiqh” (A Book of Styles in the Islamic Law) and devoted to the main principles of the Islamic law. The discovery of these two precious manuscripts by Doctor Abdulmajid Turki was an important histori­cal finding in the field of study and investigation of the Islamic law. Because these works were created eight centuries ago and since dien they have never been mentioned in the historical works of the scholars devoted to the science of kalam and in the bibliographic works containing the list of the scholars of the East. Even modern scholars carrying scientific investigations in this field have never mentioned these manuscripts. The discoverer of these precious manuscripts Doctor Abdulmajid began unexpectedly a wide-scaled investigation on these manuscripts and prepared a critical edition of diese works. As a result of these endeavours, in 1995, there appeared two new editions of the books: “Kitab at-tamhiyd li-qava’id at-I awhid” and “Kitab fi usul al-fiqh” which were published in the publishing house “Dar al-gharb al-Islami” in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.

Ubaydulla Uvatov
Professor, Doctor of History

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