Muhammad Ali al-Sabuni محمد علي الصابوني

Muhammad Ali al-Sabuni (1930-2021 CE) was a Syrian scholar of Qurʾanic exegesis and the Islamic sciences, born in Aleppo into a family of religious learning. He studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, returned to teach in Syria, and later spent much of his career in the Faculty of Shariʿa at Umm al-Qura University in Makka, where he lectured for nearly three decades. He was Hanafi in law and Maturidi in creed.

He is best known for Safwat al-Tafasir (The Choicest of Commentaries), a three-volume work that distills and synthesizes the major classical exegeses, such as those of al-Tabari, al-Razi, al-Qurtubi, and Ibn Kathir, into a clear, ordered commentary. Widely used by students, it remains one of the most popular single-author tafsirs of the modern period; the MeccaBooks selections on Surahs al-Rahman, Yasin, al-Mulk, al-Waqiʿa, and others draw from it. His al-Tibyan fi ʿUlum al-Qurʾan is a concise and much-taught primer on the Qurʾanic sciences, and he also wrote on Islamic inheritance law and on the infallibility of the prophets, defending the inherited understanding against modernist criticism.

Valued for clarity and accessibility rather than novelty, his works brought the classical exegetical tradition within reach of a broad readership. He died in Yalova, Turkey, in 2021.