Jamma'il

Jamma'il is a village in the land of Nablus in the Holy Land, as Ibn Rajab locates it in al-Dhayl ala Tabaqat al-Hanabila when recording that the hafiz Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi was born there in 541 AH. ¹ Its name lives on in the nisba "al-Jamma'ili" carried by the men of this Hanbali family after it moved to Damascus. ¹

At Jamma'il Shaykh Abu Umar Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Qudama was born in 528 AH, as his nephew al-Diya' copied from his father's handwriting. ² His brother Muwaffaq al-Din Ibn Qudama was born there in Sha'ban 541. ³ Al-Imad Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Wahid, brother of the hafiz Abd al-Ghani, was born there in 543. ⁴ Ibn Rajab records others born there too, among them the jurist Shihab al-Din Muhammad ibn Khalaf ibn Rajih al-Maqdisi in 550. ⁵

The father of Abu Umar and al-Muwaffaq, Shaykh Abu al-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Qudama, was the preacher (khatib) of Jamma'il. ⁶ Ibn Rajab describes him as righteous, ascetic, devoted to worship and held in awe, reports that he completed the Qur'an sixty-five times in one Ramadan, and gives his birth as 491 AH and his death as 558 AH, with burial on the slope of Qasyun. ⁶

Ahmad ibn Qudama took his household from Jamma'il to Damascus in 551 AH; the reason al-Diya' gives is that the Franks had taken the Holy Land. ² They first lodged for about two years in the mosque of Abu Salih outside the Eastern Gate, then moved up to the mountain, and people began to say "the Salihiyya", after that mosque; Abu Umar used to say: they name us after Abu Salih's mosque, not because we are righteous (salihun). ² Ibn Rajab quotes the handwriting of Abu al-Faraj Ibn al-Hanbali that the mosque proved unhealthy for them, close to forty of them dying in a single month, and that his own father advised them to move to the mountain. ² So al-Salihiyya on the slope of Qasyun became the new home of the people of Jamma'il.