Muhammad Shafi Usmani محمد شفيع العثماني

Mufti Muhammad Shafi Usmani rahimahullah (1897-1976) was a pre-eminent Hanafi scholar of the Indian subcontinent and the first Grand Mufti of Pakistan. Born in 1897, he trained under Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi at Darul Uloom Deoband, where he later served as a teacher and deputy mufti. Following the partition of India in 1947, he emigrated to Pakistan and in 1951 founded Darul Uloom Karachi, which became one of the foremost Islamic seminaries in the country. He is best known for Maariful Qur'an, his eight-volume Urdu commentary on the Qur'an, which has been translated into English and other languages and remains a standard reference work in traditional Islamic scholarship. He also authored numerous works on fiqh, hadith, and the prophetic biography. He passed away in 1976 in Karachi.