Syeikh al-Bouti killed in Damascus blast

Sheikh Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti was killed at the age of 84 in a suicide bombing that targeted a mosque in Damascus. (AFP)

A senior pro-government Sunni cleric is among dozens of people killed in a suicide attack in the Syrian capital after a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mosque.

Dr Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti, a longtime supporter of President Bashar al-Assad and Imam of Damascus' historic Ummayyad Mosque, was killed in the explosion in the Iman Mosque in the central Mezzeh district.

"The number of those martyred in the terrorist suicide attack in the Iman Mosque rises to 42 martyrs with 84 injured," a bulletin on state television said, citing the country's health ministry.

Syrian TV said among those killed were Bouti's grandson. Television footage showed wounded people and bodies with severed limbs on the bloodstained floor of the mosque. Ambulances rushed to the scene of the explosion, which was sealed off by the military.

Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, president of the opposition National Coalition, condemned the blast, saying he suspected the regime was behind the attack.

"This is a crime by any measure that is completely rejected," he told the AFP news agency in Cairo by telephone.

Bouti's death is a major blow to Syria's embattled leader, who is fighting mainly Sunni rebels seeking his overthrow. The cleric, believed to be in his 90s, has been a vocal supporter of his regime since the early days of Assad's father and predecessor, the late President Hafez Assad.

In recent months, Syrian TV has carried Bouti's sermon from mosques in Damascus live every week. He also hosts a regular religious television programme. Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Beirut, said: "We know that in the past years, he's [Bouti] been a prominent cleric against the Muslim Brotherhood movement, so for the regime, his death is a loss." - Al Jazeera.

Al Arabiya - While most of the Muslim Sunnis in Syria have risen up against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a prominent Sunni Muslim scholar took a different route by supporting the Syrian regime.

On Thursday, that man -- Sheikh Mohammed Saeed Ramadan al-Bouti -- was killed at the age of 84 in a suicide bombing that targeted a mosque in Damascus.

Al- Bouti held weekly sermons at the historic Ummayyad Mosque and in recent months, Syrian TV has carried his weekly addresses live. Bouti also had a regular religious TV program.

The sheikh belongs to a Kurdish tribe that is spread across Syria, Iraq and Turkey. He was born on the Boutan Island of Turkey in 1929 and headed to Syria with his father at the age of four. Once a little older he went on to study religion in Damascus.

Al-Bouti started his career teaching at a secondary school in Homs in 1958 and 1961, he was appointed as part of the Shariah faculty at Damascus University.

In 1965, Bouti moved to Egypt where he received a doctorate in Sharia law at al-Azhar University. He headed back to Syria, and where he was once a faculty member, he progressed into the respected position of vice dean at the College of Islamic Law at Damascus University in 1975 and in 1977 became dean.

Bouti then retired but continued to lecture and write about Islamic affairs. He has authored more than 60 books and was a prominent religious reference in the Muslim world, holding the presidency of the Scholars Union for the Levant region.

Bouti was a vocal supporter of the Syrian regime since the early days of Assad's father and predecessor, the late President Hafez Assad.

Following the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, Bouti criticized anti-regime protests and urged demonstrators not to follow "calls of unknown sources that want to exploit mosques to incite seditions and chaos in Syria."

He said “most of the protesters do not pray” and criticized prominent Egyptian scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi for playing “demagoguery that opens the door of sedition.” Qaradawi has supported revolutions in several Arab Spring countries. But despite his open support for Assad, al-Bouti was reported to have issued a Fatwa, or a religious edict prohibiting the killing of protesters.

In a recent study of the top 500 influential Muslim scholars in the Islamic world by the Jordan-based Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, al-Bouti, came in 27th place.

A Facebook page that claims to represent Bouti has 46,387 likes.