Background
Ghumari, being a member of the prominent Ghumari family, grew up surrounded by Islamic religious scholarship. Ghumari was born on the 27th of Ramadan in 1320 according to the Islamic calendar, corresponding to December 26, 1902 Gregorian.
Ghumari, being a member of the prominent Ghumari family, grew up surrounded by Islamic religious scholarship. Ghumari was born on the 27th of Ramadan in 1320 according to the Islamic calendar, corresponding to December 26, 1902 Gregorian.
As a child, he studied in Morocco's traditional madrasa system, memorizing the entire Qur'an by heart, in addition to traditional Islamic texts such as Alfiya, Ajārūmīya and Bulugh al-Maram.
He was the older brother of fellow clerics Abdullah al-Ghumari and Abd al-Aziz al-Ghumari. In 1921, he traveled to Egypt and enrolled in Al-Azhar University, returning to Morocco upon the death of his father. Ahmad al-Ghumari, upon hearing the news of his younger brother's long sentence, fell extremely ill and died eight months later.
Ghumari was a prolific writer, having 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 between 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.
Like all of the Ghumari family of Muslim clerics, Ahmad al-Ghumari's exact sectarian views are difficult to pinpoint. Although a practitioner of Sufism, Ghumari is a strong critic of many Sufis, especially the rival Naqshbandi order. Like Ibn Hazm, Ghumari viewed scholarly difference of opinion as a curse.
Like his brothers, he often used harsh language when responding to intellectual opponents.
