Ibn Abidin

Ibn 'Abidin, known in the Indian subcontinent as al-Shami, was an Islamic scholar and Jurist who lived in the city of Damascus in Syria during the Ottoman era. He was the authority of the fiqh of the Hanafi madhhab. He was a state employee with the title of Amin al-fatwa. This meant that he was the mufti that people would go to when they had legal questions in Damascus. He composed over 50 works consisting of a major fatwa collection, many treatises, poems, and several commentaries on the works of others.