Career
Born in Buzanjird near Hamadan in 1062, he moved from Hamadan to Baghdad when he was eighteen years of age. He kept association in Baghdad with the great scholar, Abu Ishaq ash-Shirazi, who gave him greater deference than to any of his other students although he was the youngest. According to Ibn Khallikan, he began his religious career with the cultivation of the religious sciences, becoming both a respected scholar of hadith and fiqh and a popular preacher in Baghdad.
He was so brilliant a jurisprudent that he became the Marja of his time for all scholars in that field
He was known in Baghdad, the center of Islamic knowledge, in Isfahan, Bukhara, Samarqand, Khwarazm, and throughout Central Asia. Later he abandoned these pursuits, adopting an intensely ascetic way of life and travelled east, first settling in Herat and later in Merv, where his tomb is still reputed to exist.
He became an ascetic and engaged in constant worship and mujahada (spiritual struggle), instructed by Shaykh Abu "Ali al-Farmadhi. He associated with Shaykh Abdullah Ghuwayni and Shaykh Hasan Simnani.