Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi

Abd al-Ghani ibn Abd al-Wahid al-Jamma'ili al-Maqdisi (c. 541-600 AH / 1146-1203 CE) was a leading Sunni hadith scholar (muhaddith) of the Hanbali school of law. He was born in Jamma'il, a village near Nablus in Palestine, into a family later known as the Banu Qudama. While he was young, his kin joined a wave of Palestinian Muslims who left Crusader-controlled territory for Damascus, where they settled on the slopes of Mount Qasiyun in the district that became known as al-Salihiyya. He was the maternal cousin and lifelong companion of Muwaffaq al-Din Ibn Qudama, author of the major Hanbali legal work al-Mughni.

Like many hadith specialists, he traveled widely to "hear" traditions from teachers, with reported journeys to Baghdad, Mosul, Isfahan, Harran, Hamadan, and Egypt (including Alexandria). He earned a reputation for prodigious memory and was honored with the title "leader of the believers in hadith" (amir al-mu'minin fi al-hadith). His best-known works are Umdat al-Ahkam, a much-studied digest of legal hadith, and al-Kamal fi Asma' al-Rijal, a biographical dictionary of narrators.

His insistence on teaching hadith describing the divine attributes brought him into conflict with some Ash'ari-Shafi'i scholars of Damascus; sources report he was eventually barred from teaching there and departed for Egypt, where he died in 600 AH (1203 CE) and was buried in the Qarafa cemetery near Cairo. The theological dispute is presented here as a contested matter, not as a verdict on either side.