Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandī

Kamal-ud-Din Abd-ur-Razzaq ibn Ishaq Samarqandi (Persian: کمال‌الدین عبدالرزاق بن اسحاق سمرقندی‎‎, 1413–1482), was a Persian Timurid chronicler and Islamic scholar. He was for a while the ambassador of Shah Rukh, the Timurid dynasty ruler of Persia. In his role as ambassador he visited Calicut in western India in the early 1440s. He wrote a narrative of what he saw in Calicut which is valuable as information on Calicut's society and culture. He is also the producer of a lengthy narrative or chronicle of the history of the Timurid dynasty and its predecessors in Central Asia, but this is not so valuable because it is mostly a compilation of material from earlier written sources that are mostly available from elsewhere in the earlier form.

Abd-ur Razzaq was born in Herat on 7 November 1413. His father Jalal-ud-Din Ishaq was the qazi and imam of the Shah Rukh's court in Herat. He studied with his father and his elder brother Sharif-ud-Din Abdur Qahhar and together with them obtained an ijazah (license) from Shams-ud-Din Mohammad Jazari in 1429. After the death of his father in 1437, he was appointed the qazi of the Shah Rukh's court.

Abd-ur-Razzaq was the ambassador of Shah Rukh, the Timurid dynasty ruler of Persia to Calicut, India, from January 1442 to January 1445. He wrote a 45-page narrative of this mission to India. It appears as a chapter in his book Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain (مطلع السعدين ومجمع البحرين) (The Rise of the Two auspicious constellations and the Confluence of the Two Oceans), a book of about 450 pages which contains a detailed chronicle of the history of his part of the world from 1304 to 1470 and which takes much of its contents from other writings.

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