Qutb al-Din ibn Sultan

Qutb al-Din Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Umar ibn Sultan al-Dimashqi al-Salihi al-Hanafi, Shaykh al-Islam and mufti of the lands of al-Sham. He was born on the night of the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal in the year 870. He studied with the judge Abd al-Barr ibn al-Shihna and others. He held the teaching post of the Qasa'iyya madrasa, which is reserved for Hanafis, and the teaching post of the Zahiriyya madrasa, where he lived, and he supervised it. He also taught at the Umayyad mosque and held other high posts. In the reign of al-Ghuri he served as judge in Egypt, as deputy for his teacher Ibn al-Shihna ².

Later his sight failed, while his eyes still looked beautiful, so that people thought they could see. He had a handsome face and a fine character, was of great standing, dignified and respected, and his word carried weight with the state. Amirs came to him for fatwas, and he held the reins of the jurists. He dictated answers to those who wrote down the questions that were brought to him. He had a carved seal that he used to stamp fatwas, for fear that they might be tampered with. He kept his dignity intact, so that he never stumbled, and he walked in the dark as surely as someone who could see ¹.

He held that coffee was forbidden. He wrote a jurisprudential work, a treatise on the prohibition of opium, and a book called "The Shining Lightning on the Prohibition of Blessing in the Mosque". He died on the night of Tuesday, the seventeenth of Dhu al-Qada, and was buried inside the Qalandariyya tomb near Bab al-Saghir. A funeral poem written for him praised him as a trustworthy guardian of the people of al-Sham, a mufti whose rulings were relied upon, and a man of precise knowledge and forbearance ³.