He was born into a humble and impoverished family in the city of Granada which was the capital of Nasri Kingdom under the reign of Sultan Muhammad V al-Ghani Billah at the time.
Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Biri (d. 754H/1353CE), dubbed the "master of grammarians" (Shaykh al-Nuhat) in Andalus, was his first instructor in Arabic language and grammar.
After Al-Biri's passing, Shatibi completed his study of Arabic language and grammar with Abu al-Qasim al-Sharif al-Sibti (d. 760H/1358CE).
[6] Al-Shatibi learned fiqh from the renowned Andalusian jurist Abu Sa'id ibn Lubb, who served as Granada's khatib (preacher) and mufti.
For his fiqh education, he owed a great deal to his mentor Ibn Lubb, although they later got into arguments over a number of different topics.
The second of them, Abu Abdullah al-Sharif al-Tilmisani (d. 771H/1369CE), was regarded by his contemporaries as "The Most Knowledgeable Man" and had acquired the status of mujtahid.
Under the tutelage of the renowned scholar of his era, al-Shatibi studied Al-Muwatta’ of Imam Malik and Sahih al-Bukhari.
This date was verified by one of the Imam's most well-known pupils, Abu Yahya ibn 'Asim, in his Nayl al-Muna, an abbreviated version of Al-Muwafaqat.
His theories of maqasid al-Shariah and Maslahah are widely studied and frequently noticed in the creation of modern laws and in the search for concepts for the larger agenda of civilizational renewal.
This is mostly due to the fact that these beliefs were developed in response to the problems, difficulties, and societal shifts of his period, which was an extremely affluent and thriving al-Andalus.
[8] Rashid Rida and other contemporary academics regarded him as one of the eighth and fourteenth-century "mujaddids", or religious revivalists of the century, on par with Ibn Khaldun.
Thus far, Imam al-Shatibi's biographies have documented the following treatises, which are primarily in the areas of Arabic grammar and fiqh:[9] Tawfique Al-Mubarak (January 2015).