Ahmed Kuftaro

Ahmed Kuftaro was a prominent Sunni Muslim scholar and leader of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Syria. He was born in Damascus in 1915 to a Kurdish family that had migrated from Turkey. He received a traditional education in Quran, Tafsir, Hadith and Islamic jurisprudence from his father and other scholars in Damascus. He became a mosque teacher in Quneitra in 1948 and then moved back to Damascus in 1950. He was appointed as the Mufti of the Shafi'i school in Damascus in 1952 and became a member of the Higher Ifta Council. He succeeded his father as the Grand Mufti of Syria in 1964 and held this position until his death in 2004. He was the highest officially appointed Sunni Muslim representative of the Fatwa-Administration in the Syrian Ministry of Auqaf. He was also the founder and head of the Abu al-Nur Foundation, a religious and educational institution that runs a mosque, a college, a library, a hospital and a media center. He was known for his advocacy of interreligious dialogue and cooperation, especially with Christians and Jews. He visited many countries as a representative of Syrian state Islam, including a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1985. He also signed the Amman Message, a statement calling for tolerance and unity in the Muslim world, in 2004. He died of heart failure in Damascus on 1 September 2004 and was buried at the Abu al-Nur Mosque. He was succeeded by Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun as the Grand Mufti of Syria.