Muhammad Said Ramadan Al-Bouti (Arabic: مُحَمَّد سَعِيد رَمَضَان ٱلْبُوطِي, romanized: Muḥammad Saʿīd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī) (1929 – 21 March 2013) was a renowned Syrian Sunni Muslim scholar, writer and professor, where he was vice dean in the Damascus University and served as the imam of the Umayyad Mosque.

[9] His father was Mulla Ramadan Al-Bouti, an ulama and hails from the Hadhabani Kurdish tribe that was present in a number of regions across Levant, Iraq, and Turkey.

[16] He subsequently became a lecturer in comparative law and religious studies at Damascus University; for some time he was also the Dean of the Sharfa faculty.

[19] During the Muslim Brotherhood's revolution in 1979 in Syria, al-Bouti vocally condemned the attacks against the Syrian Baathist government by Islamist militants,[20] while most of his senior colleagues were either silent or supportive of the opposition.

[16] Al-Bouti was chosen for the Dubai International Holy Quran Award in its eighth session in 2004 (1425 AH) to be the "personality of the Muslim world".

[16] Most of al-Bouti's ideas are put forward within the framework of traditional legal scholarship, frequently referring to Qur'anic verses, Hadith and the opinions of the leading classical authorities, in particular al-Nawawi, Ibn al-Arabi, al-Ghazali, and al-Shafi'i.

[3][4] Aside from religious matters, he also wrote various works on non-religious subjects such his translation of Mam and Zin, a famous Kurdish story, into Arabic.

"[10] The opposition called him a hypocrite over his support for the uprising in Egypt, which he had written was Islamic, only to condemn protests as un-Islamic when they broke out in Syria itself.

Al-Bouti did criticise President Assad in public, shortly after demonstrations had started, for a government decision to fire hundreds of female teachers for wearing the hijab.

[27] According to Thomas Pierret – a lecturer in Contemporary Islam at the University of Edinburgh – the death of Al-Bouti means the loss of the "last credible ally among the Sunni religious elite" for the Syrian government.

Among opposition forces there was "a mixture of suspicion and shock that a notable religious figure ... would be targeted" by a suicide bomber inside a mosque.

None of the figures show any attempt "to attend to [Al-Bouti] or investigate his injuries", and their movements have "nothing of the panic and chaos that accompanies big bomb explosions in crowded places".