Sheikh Qasim al-Arrabi (the elder)

Sheikh Qasim Arrabi was mufti of Akka in the Ottoman period. Family members say he came to Akka from the Hijaz and married a woman from the city. The gravestone of his daughter Amna, dated 1331 AH (about 1912), calls him 'the great scholar Sheikh Qasim Arrabi, former mufti of Akka'. He is not in the 1932 photograph, but his grandson Sheikh Ibrahim al-Akki sits at its centre.

According to a biography the family has collected, whose source is not yet verified, he was trained in Hanafi law and, as mufti of the Akka district, sat on the district council beside the governor and the sharia judge. He corresponded with Sheikh Muhammad al-Jisr of Tripoli. When the Tunisian Sheikh Ali Nur al-Din al-Yashruti arrived in Akka in 1850, Sheikh Qasim was among the first to meet him and join his Shadhili order, which encouraged other notables to follow; the order's zawiya in Akka's al-Mujadala quarter was founded in 1868. Late in life he suffered from a plot by rivals in Akka's administration.