Saud Al-Shuraim

Saud ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Shuraim (born 19 January 1966) is a Saudi scholar and reciter who served as imam and khatib of the Grand Mosque in Mecca from 1991 until his retirement in 2022. He was a professor of sharia and Islamic studies at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca and dean of its Faculty of Sharia and Islamic Studies, and with Abdur-Rahman As-Sudais he formed the pair of Tarawih prayer leaders nicknamed the "Twins of the Haram".¹²

He was born in Riyadh on 19 January 1966, as the Arabic article states, pairing the date with Thursday 17 Ramadan 1386 AH. He studied at Areen Elementary School, then at the Modern Schools for secondary, graduating from Al-Yarmouk Al-Shamila in 1983, and entered Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in 1984, graduating in 1989. In 1992 he earned a master's degree at the university's Higher Judicial Institute, in comparative jurisprudence, and in 1996 a doctorate at Umm al-Qura University, with highest honours, on routes of transmission in the rituals of Hajj; his doctoral research was supervised by Abdul-Aziz bin Baz. Among his teachers in fiqh, the Arabic article names Saleh Al-Fawzan, from whom he took the fiqh of sales at the Higher Judicial Institute in 1410 AH.¹²

He memorised the Qur'an under a series of teachers — for the middle part of the day under Shaykh Abdulrahman al-Mutrafi, at dawn under Shaykh Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Shaykh, and in the evenings under Shaykh Muhammad al-Amir al-Shanqiti — and finished under Shaykh Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Jibrin. He received ijazat in Hanbali jurisprudence, hadith and tafsir.²

By royal decree of King Fahd he was appointed imam and khatib of the Grand Mosque in 1991 (1412 AH). From 1993 he taught in the Haram on hadith and fiqh, and in 1995 he was assigned to teach at Umm al-Qura's Faculty of Sharia, where he became professor of sharia and Islamic studies and dean of the faculty. He led the Tarawih prayers at the Grand Mosque alongside Abdur-Rahman As-Sudais — the pair nicknamed the "Twins of the Haram", in some periods joined by Abdullah Awad Al Juhany — and his tenure ran to his retirement in 2022.¹²

In 1998 he visited Malaysia, reading at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre while a guest of the Malaysian government. In May 2017 he denied a decision to appoint women imams at the Grand Mosque that had been attributed to him. A fake-quotes website later attributed sayings to him that the French article judges unlikely; he has never had a social-media account.³¹

The Arabic article reports that he was fluent in English, descended from the Al-Haraqis of the Bani Zaid tribe of Najd, and had four children.²

The museum records his faith as unknown. The English infobox gives his denomination as Sunni, creed Athari, jurisprudence Hanbali and movement Salafi; the Urdu gives jurisprudence Hanbali and movado Salafi; the French gives Sunni and Salafi; the Arabic infobox gives his creed as Ahl al-Sunna wa-l-Jama'a with the jurisprudence field empty; the Arabic categories file him among Hanbali scholars. Wikidata gives only Islam. No article text names a school for him personally — his Hanbali formation and his ijazat in Hanbali fiqh are education, not attestation — and his imamate was an office. Infoboxes and filings are one structured tradition, not two independent attestations.¹²⁴

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