Muhammad Atallah al-Kasm was born in Damascus in 1844 into a wealthy family of scholars, merchants, and scientists whose noble lineage traces back to Ali ibn Abu Talib.
It was midway through the war that a dispute arose between him and the Ottoman military ruler Djemal Pasha, after the Damascene scholar openly condemned the decision to execute several notables and deputies in Marjeh Square on 6 May 1916.
Those executed included deputies, intellectuals and lawyers such as Shafiq Mayad al-Azm, Rushdi al-Shama'a, Rafiq Rizq Sallum, Abd al-Wahhab al-Anglizi and other nationalist leaders of Syrian society at the time, who were sentenced to death for high treason and conspiracy.
[3] In the mid-1920s, Atallah al-Kasm joined the Islamic Guidance Association, which was founded by one of his students, Sheikh Mahmud Yassin, and participated in the publicity ceremony held at the Arab Academy headquarters.
Mahmud Yassin assumed the presidency of the association and was interested in creating a network of Islamic schools to educate the illiterate and orphaned children of rebel fighters, and Atallah, as mufti, sponsored the project, but French intelligence closed it down due to its anti-colonial involvements.