Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani (1492/3–1565, AH 898–973, full name Arabic: عبد الوهاب ابن أحمد الشعرانى ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Aḥmad ash-Shaʿrānī) was a highly influential Egyptian scholar.
[10] Al-Sha'rani claimed that Musa Abu 'Imran, the son of the Sultan of Tlemcen in North Africa, was his ancestor five generations ago.
"[11] In a village north of Cairo, Egypt, Abd al-Wahhab Ibn Ahmad al-Sha'rani was born in the years 898 or 899 A.H. (1492/1493 C.E.).
He made the decision to proceed with Shaykh Ali al-Khawas, who, following a brief conversation, gave al-Sha'rani the order to sell all of his numerous books and give the earnings to the needy.
Al-Sha'rani was ordered to withdraw into seclusion for a whole year with the stringent condition of avoiding all gatherings of Islamic knowledge after informing al-Khawas that he had completed this assignment.
Al-Sha'rani also disparages the Khalwati order, which was once prominent among Turkish soldiers, claiming that it encourages hallucinations rather than genuine religious experience.
[15] His seminal work Al-Mīzan al-Kubra (The Supreme Scale), al-Sha'rani present a theory based on Sufi presumptions that strives to unite or at least equalise the four madhabs and emphasises the need to reduce the gaps between them.
Al-Sha'rani often condemned the fuqaha (jurists) for burdening the common people with intricate legal issues that had little bearing on the core principles of Islam.
[16][11] In his capacity as a historian of Sufism and as a defender of it, Al-Sha'rani assembled collections of Tabakat that contained the lives and sayings of Sufis.
Al-Sha'rani, like Al-Suyuti before him, maintained that one should regard Ibn Arabi as a great saint but refrain from reading his problematic books.