[7] His father taught him in his hometown until the early teens, when he moved to Cairo in pursuit of higher education and more authoritative teachers.
According to his biographers, al-Qarafi studied at Sahibiyya, a Maliki madrasa in Cairo that was established sometime around 1214 by the vizier Safi l-Din 'Abd Allah al'Aziz ibn Shakr.
[8][9] Without a doubt, the most significant of his teachers was the Damascene scholar, Izz al-Din ibn 'Abd al-Salam, who was regarded as the foremost Shafi'i authority of his era.
His writings on lexicography, grammar, mathematics, algebra, optics, and astronomy, as well as those cited in sources, offer us an idea of his wide-ranging interests and demonstrate what Jackson refers to as "an almost irreverent passion for knowledge."
It seems that al-Qarafi briefly lost his position at the Salihiyya to Nafis al-Din Ibn Shurk, but he eventually won it back and held onto it until his passing.
[10][11] On Sunday, 30 Jumada 11 684/ 2 September 1285, al-Qarafi passed away at Dayr al-Tin, a village on the Nile bank in the Birkat al-Habash region, just south of Cairo.
His insistence on the limits of law underscores the importance of non-legal (not to be confused with illegal) considerations in determining the proper course of action, with significant implications for legal reform in the modern Islamic world.
His views on the common good (maslahah) and custom provide means to accommodate the space-time differential between modern and premodern realities.
[14] Al-Qarafi was an energic and prolific writer who wrote on a wide range of topics, including theology, jurisprudence, legal theory, anti-Christian polemics, Arabic language sciences, Qur'anic interpretations, etc.