He was born in the village of Taymiyyah in Eastern Arabia (specifically what is now Al-Ahsa Governorate) during the reign of the first Jabrid Emir, and was raised in prosperity by his father Zain al-Din Ali and grandfather Ibrahim, both Shi’ite scholars.
Ibn Abi Jumhur traveled extensively throughout the rest of his life between Persia and Iraq (both governed then by the Timurid Empire as well as his native land, mostly staying in Mashhad, Najaf, and Al-Ahsa respectively.
Among the scholars who gave him permission to transmit hadiths were Hazr al-Din al-Awali al-Bahrani, Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Musawi al-Ahsa’i, and Abdullah bin Fathallah al-Qummi.
[6] After finishing his Hajj, Ibn Abi Jumhur returned to his native Al-Ahsa and stayed there awhile until he traveled to Iraq and Khorasan in 1473, along the way writing the letters زاد المسافرين (“Greater Journeys”) and أصول الدين (“Basics of Faith”).
When he reached Mashhad, he began training with Muhsin bin Muhammad Al-Radawi Al-Qummi, who commissioned from his student a treatise known as البراهين في شرح زاد المسافرين (“Proofs for Explaining Ibn al-Jazzar’s Zād al-Musāfir”, a medical work known by medieval Latins as Viaticum).
Some sources believe the other debater, labeled al-Fadhel al-Harawi, was in fact the Shafi’i jurist Ahmad bin Yahya al-Taftazani, the chief ulema of Herat for 30 years who would be killed along with a number of other Sunni clerics by the founding Safavid Emperor Ismail I in 1510.
Muhammad Ashraf bin Ali al-Sharif al-Husseini published a translation in 1679 during the reign of Suleiman of Persia, as did Ibn Zain Al-Din Al-Alam Al-Asfahani in his book الزهرات الزوية في الروضة البهية (“zawiya in the Basalar School”) during Ramadan on July 14, 1687.
Afterward, he moved to Bahrain (then called Awal), where he dictated his book البوارق المحسنية لتجلي الدرة الجمهورية (“Improved Insights into the Principles of Fiqh”) over four majlis (seminars) ending on March 2, 1483.
Then he traveled to Gorgan (then called Astarabad) to authorize his student Muhammad bin Saleh al-Gharawi al-Hilli in the nearby village of Qalqan, along with another named Jalaluddin Bahram.
That year, he traveled to Medina to complete his work معين الفكر في شرح الباب الحادي عشر (“Some Thoughts on Explaining the Eleventh Surah”).
[5] Ibn Abi Jumhur was considered a leading Shi’ite Muslim scholar of his time and was well-versed in fiqh, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and hadith interpretation.
According to Kamil Mustafa Shaybi, Ibn Abi Jumhur al-Ahsa’i was the next iteration of the thought of Maitham Al Bahrani and Haydar Amuli and a model for that of Shaykh Ahmad.
[10] Ibn Abi Jumhur is perhaps best remembered for promulgating a key doctrine of Shi’ite scholarship, the maxim that “synthesis, however possible, is more appropriate than removal from canon.”[11] This theory holds that wherever multiple narratives on the word of the Twelve Imams conflict but are clearly transmitted and can be reconciled, they should be combined rather than favoring one tradition over another so as not to give undue weight to fame, friends’ work, contravention, or personal preference.
The book is in two volumes, the first expounding on the Tawhid and the second on studies of verbs on the grounds that theology is “in fact divided into them.” Ibn Abi Jumhur revered al-Bahrani as “the greatest scholar and the deepest intellect,” though he relied on Allamah Al-Hilli for insights on etiology and epistemology.
[13] A mosque in Taymiyyah is attributed to Ibn Abi Jumhur’s time and includes an engraving in the mihrab dated to 1407, when his father Ali and grandfather Ibrahim would have prayed there.