Al-Sarakhsi

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Sarakhsi was born in Sarakhs on the border of Khorasan and studied in Bukhara, becoming the supreme legal authority of the Hanafi school. Because he courageously criticized the ruler of the Karakhanid dynasty for an invalid marriage and financial abuses, he was imprisoned for fifteen years in an abandoned well in Uzgend.

Despite being deprived of books in his dungeon, Sarakhsi dictated his monumental thirty-volume legal encyclopedia Al-Mabsut entirely from memory to his students sitting at the mouth of the pit. His works, including Sharh al-Siyar al-Kabir, established the foundations of international humanitarian law and commercial jurisprudence in the medieval world.