Sheikh Zainuddin ibn Ali was born in today’s Kochi in Kerala in 871 or AH/ 1466 or 1467 CE. He is a writer, historian, scholar, and a reputed religious and spiritual educator.

Born into a family of religious and cultural respectability – Sheikh Zainuddin ibn Ali is considered to be the first Makhdhum (acclaimed scholar-writer-judge in the Ponnani tradition). He was born in today’s Kochi in Kerala in 871 or AH/ 1466 or 1467 CE. He had his primary education in ‘Nahv’ and ‘Fiqh’ in Ponnani and continued his further education in Calicut and Chaliyam. He is a reputed Scholar and Qadi, but remembered as a writer whose ballads, religious and spiritual treatises and historical works have deeply influenced scholars and historians across space and time. He breathed his last in 928 AH/ 1521 CE and was buried near the Jami Masjid of Ponnani. Besides Tahrid, Zainuddin ibn Ali has sixteen works to his credit of which, Hidayatul Adhkiya’ Ila Tariqat al- Awliya’ (a long poem in 188 lines about Tasawwuf), is well- renowned, adopted as it is as text books in mosque academics.