Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi

Shaykh Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi (March 19, 1641 – March 5, 1731), an eminent Muslim scholar and Sufi, was born in Damascus in 1641 into a family of Islamic scholarship. His father, Isma'il Abd al-Ghani, was a jurist in the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam and a contributor to Arabic literature. Abd al-Ghani did not trace his descent to the city of [Nablus] as some laymen think, hence his surname Nabulsi has nothing to deal with the city of (Nablus).^[1]

Abd al-Ghani showed diligence in the pursuit of Islamic knowledge and before the age of 20 he was both teaching and giving formal legal opinions (fatwa). He taught in the Umawi Mosque in Damascus and the Salihiyya Madrasa, becoming renowned throughout the region as an accomplished Islamic scholar.

He died and was buried in Damascus in 1731 at 90 years of age. He left behind hundreds of written works in virtually all the Islamic sciences.

His works

1. Idâh al-Maqsud min wahdat al-wujud (Clarifying What is Meant by the Unity of Being)
2. Sharh Diwan Ibn Farid (Commentary on Ibn Farid's Poem)
3. Jam'u al-Asrâr fi man'a al-Ashrâr 'an at-Ta'n fi as-Sufiyah al-Akhyar (Collection of the secrets to prevent the evils castigate the pious Sufis)
4. Shifa' al-Sadr fî Fada'il Laylat al-Nisf Min Sha'bân wa Layllat al-Qadr (Curing the heart on the Virtues of the night of Nisfu Sha'ban and The Night of Qadr), private manuscript collection, unpublished.
5. Nafahat al-Azhar 'Ala Nasamat al-Ashar
6. al-Sulh bayn al-ikhwan fi hukm ibahat al-dukhan, ed. Ahmad Muhammad Dahman (Damascus, 1924).
7. Ta‘tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, ed. Taha ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Sa‘d, 2 vols. (Damascus, n.d.)
8. al-Haqiqa wa al-majaz fi al-rihla ila bilad al-sham wa misr wa al-hijaz, ed. Ahmad ‘Abd al-Majid al-Haridi (Cairo, 1986).
9. al-Hadra al-Unsiyya fî al-Rihla al-Qudsiyya.
10. Nihayat al-murad fi sharh hadiyat Ibn al-‘Imad, ed. ‘‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Halabi (Limmasol, 1994).
11. al-Hadiqa al-nadiyya: Sharh al-tariqa al-muhammadiyya, 2 vols. (Lailbur, 1977).
12. Hillat al-dhahab al-ibriz fi rihlat Ba'albak wa-al-Biqa' al-'aziz.
13. Kitab 'ilm al-malahah fi 'ilm al-falahah.

References

1. ^ Islamic Cultural Centre. (1970). The Islamic Quarterly. Islamic Cultural Centre, p.86.

• Barbara von Schlegell, "Sufism in the Ottoman Arab World: Shaykh ‘‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997.
• Smoking and "Early Modern" Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries) [1]

Persondata
Name	Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi
Alternative names
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Date of birth	March 19, 1641
Place of birth
Date of death	March 5, 1731
Place of death