Muhammad Jamil al-Shatti

Muḥammad Jamīl ash-Shaṭṭī (1882–1958) was a Syrian judge, poet, and Islamic scholar of the Hanbali school. As a Hanbali scholar, he held a position as a leading member of the Hanbalis of Damascus and a preacher at the Hanabila Mosque.

Biography Muhammad Jamil ibn Umar was born in the year 1882 in Baghdad, Iraq during Ottoman rule, but later moved to Damascus, Syria. He was a member of the scholarly Ash-Shatti family and a paternal cousin of Mustafa ash-Shatti, a scholar of the Hanbali school and the former Mufti of Douma who dealt with poetry and combating extremism. In his adulthood, Ash-Shatti studied with his uncle, before moving on to study Hadith under the muhaddith and theologian Bakr al-Attar and later a Shafi'i Ash'ari scholar, Badr al-Din al-Hasani and a Salafi reformist, Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi. In 1918, he was appointed as the Mufti of the Hanbalis of Damascus and allowed to give fatwas based on the school's opinions. He was also given the role of a qāḍī. He later took an interest in poetry, composing sets of poems in reverence of Islam.

Ash-Shatti passed away in 1958 due to old age. al-Wasīṭ fī al-Ifrāṭ wa al-Tafriṭ, fī al-Radd ʿalā al-Salafiyyah al-Wahhābiyyah: A book refuting the emerging ideology of Wahhabism and the Salafi movement, which had gained prominence in Damascus at the time. Ash-Shatti criticizes the founder of Wahhabism, Ibn Abdul Wahhab, for his interpretation of takfir and the violence of the Najdis; although he considers them to still be Muslims, just ghulat ("extremist").