Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī was a reputable Shafi‘i Muslim hadith scholar and historian who was born in Cairo. Al-Sakhawi refers to the village of Sakha in Egypt, where his relatives belonged. He was a prolific writer that excelled in the knowledge of hadith, tafsir, literature, and history. His work was also anthropological. For example, in Egypt he recorded the marital history of 500 women, the largest sample on marriage in the Middle Ages, and found that at least a third of all women in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and the Bilad al-Sham married more than once, with many marrying three or more times. According to al-Sakhawi, as many as three out of ten marriages in 15th century Cairo ended in divorce. His proficiency in hadith has its influences trace back heavily on his Shaykh al-Hafiz, ibn Hajar al-`Asqalani. He died in Medina.
Al-Samawʾal ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī, commonly known as Samau'al al-Maghribi, was a mathematician, astronomer and physician. Born to a Jewish family, he concealed his conversion to Islam for many years in fear of offending his father, then openly embraced Islam in 1163 after he had a dream telling him to do so. His father was a Rabbi from Morocco.
Al-Amir al-Sayyid Jamal al-Din 'Abdalla al-Tanukhi was a Druze theologian and commentator. He has been described as "the most deeply revered individual in Druze history after the hudud who founded and propagated the faith". He is mostly famous for writing many books referred to as "al sharh" or الشرح in Arabic which means "the explanation". As their title suggests, these books are a deep explanation of the Epistles of Wisdom. His tomb in Aabey, Lebanon is a site of pilgrimage for the Druze.
He is credited with establishing a council of Initiates which brought together the Druze of the Chouf mountains.
Alter Kacyzne was a Jewish (Yiddish) writer, poet and photographer, known as one of the most significant contributors to Jewish-Polish cultural life in the first half of the 20th century. Among other things, he is particularly known as a photographer whose work immortalised Jewish life in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alter Lvovich Tsypkin was a Soviet legal scholar, lawyer, Doctor of Law, professor and founder of the Department of Criminal Procedure Law of Saratov State Academy of Law. In 1947 during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign he was accused by the leadership of the academy of admiration for the "bourgeois West" for publishing his fundamental research Lawyer Secret. The work itself was banned in the Soviet Union.
Al-Tijani Yusuf Bashir (1912–1937) was a Sudanese poet who wrote in Arabic. He died from tuberculosis at the age of 25, and his work only became widely known after his death. Al-Tijani's poetry is generally classified as belonging to the Romantic tradition, although he had strong Neoclassical influences.
Alton Gansky is an American novelist in the Christian fiction genre. He has written 6 non-fiction books and 23 novels, three of which were co-authored with former Army Ranger Jeff Struecker. In 2012 Gansky and Struecker's Fallen Angel was honored as the American Christian Fiction Writers' "top thriller" of that year.
Alty Karliev was a Soviet and Turkmen stage and film actor, director and dramatist. He studied at the Turkmen Drama Studio and the Baku Theatre College, graduating from the latter in 1931. After this, he worked as an actor at the Ashkhabad Drama Theatre.
