I feel like I answered a question almost identical to this once, but I can't find it in my archive anywhere.

The short answer is that there weren't any centers of learning in that area at the time - the major intellectual hubs were Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad (remember, this period also intersects with the Crusades at times, which means that there were points when it was under European occupation or a war zone).

At the time it was common practice for the literati and scholars to travel to the major imperial centers in hopes of acquiring a patron who would fund their further study and intellectual production -- so you find people from the area contributing to literature in, say, Cairo or Baghdad because they traveled there to do so. The funding didn't tend to go in the other direction (someone from one of those places sponsoring scholars in small city far away).

It's not easy to find these people because still extant texts (even in the original Arabic) are few and far between, and sometimes their kunyas aren't as descriptive as we like (names like Qudsi, Yafawi, Nabulsi, Karaki, Yarmuqi, etc., which would point to an origin in the area).

We do have surviving biographical dictionaries--most of which are untranslated--which contain lists of individuals and frequently tell us what they wrote, so we can tell that people were coming from all over to, say, Baghdad, but we may no longer have access to these works themselves. It's a hole in much of the scholarship, quite frankly - there aren't a lot of works remaining from scholars from, say, Middle or Upper Egypt, much of the Arabian peninsula, much of North Africa and al-Andalus, or even rural parts of Syria and Iraq from that period, either. (If only the Mongols hadn't burned the library in Baghdad...)

What you do see is an uptick in religious literature from the area in the early Ottoman period (i.e., period of early Ottoman rule, from the 16th century onward)--a number of 'alims lived and wrote Islamic scholarly tracts in Jerusalem, in particular. And then, of course, the entire area was intellectually quite active in the 19th century during the period of proto-Arab nationalism leading up to WWI.