Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan al-Buti

Muhammad Sa'id ibn Mulla Ramadan al-Buti (1929-2013 CE / 1348-1434 AH) was one of the most prominent Sunni scholars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Born in Jilka, a Kurdish village in Turkey near the Syrian border, he moved with his family to Damascus as a child and received his Islamic education there, studying under leading scholars of Syria including Sheikh Hasan Habannakah al-Maydani. He also completed a doctorate at al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Al-Buti taught for decades at the Faculty of Sharia at Damascus University, becoming one of its most distinguished professors. He was an ardent defender of the Ash'ari-Maturidi theological tradition and the four Sunni legal schools, and a consistent critic of what he viewed as unqualified ijtihad and the abandonment of traditional Islamic scholarship. His most celebrated work is Dawabit al-Maslaha fish-Shari'a al-Islamiyyah (The Criteria of Public Interest in Islamic Law), his doctoral thesis. He also authored Fiqh as-Sirah (Prophetic Biography Jurisprudence), one of the most widely read works on the Seerah in Arabic; and La Mazhabiyya (Against Non-Madhhabism), a critique of those who reject the four legal schools.

In addition to these, al-Buti wrote extensively on theology, ethics, and contemporary Islamic thought. His lectures and television programs reached audiences across the Arab and Muslim world. He remained in Damascus during the Syrian conflict and was killed in a bombing at a mosque in Damascus in March 2013, dying in the city he had served as a scholar for most of his life. He is remembered as one of the great defenders of traditional Sunni Islam in the modern era.