Ahmad al-Ghumari


Ahmad bin Muhammad bin al-Siddiq al-Ghumari was a Muslim traditionist and scholar of Hadith from Morocco.

Life

Ghumari was born on 26 December 1902. He was the older brother of Abdullah al-Ghumari and Abd al-Aziz al-Ghumari. As a child, he studied in Morocco's traditional madrasa system, memorizing the entire Qur'an, in addition to the traditional Islamic texts Alfiya, Ajārūmīya and Bulugh al-Maram.
In 1921, he traveled to Egypt and enrolled in Al-Azhar University, returning to Morocco upon the death of his father. Ghumari went to Egypt a second time in 1931 when his younger brothers Abdullah and Muhammad also enrolled in the university. Due to fears regarding activity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, his brother Abdullah was sentenced to ten years in prison on accusations of ties to the group in 1961. Ahmad al-Ghumari, upon hearing the news of his younger brother's long sentence, fell ill and died eight months later.

Career

Ghumari authored more than one hundred books. He was well known for a debate which acrimoniously began between him and fellow hadith scholar Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani, and later continued with Ghumari's younger brother Abdullah and Albani. Despite the older Ghumari's attestation to Albani's high level of knowledge and respected status in Hadith studies, the nature of the debate between them became personal and involved character attacks.
Like the rest of his family, Ghumari was a leader of the Siddiqiyya Sufi order, a branch of the larger Shadhili order. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali claimed that al-Ghumari had chosen to live a very simple life and eschewed material excess.

Views

Although a practitioner of Sufism, Ghumari criticized some Sufis, especially the rival Naqshbandi order. Like Ibn Hazm, Ghumari viewed scholarly differences of opinion as wrong and he often used harsh language when responding to intellectual opponents. Having originally followed the Maliki school of thought like most of Muslim scholarship in Morocco, al-Ghumari later switched to the Shafi'i school for a period and finally opted for absolute independent reasoning. Unlike most of Moroccan scholarship, al-Ghumari opposed the Ash'ari school of theology. Muhammad Abu Khubza, among other Moroccan scholars, also claim that al-Ghumari temporarily adhered to the Zaidiyyah school of Shia Islam.

Works