Ma'rouf Shtayyeh was born in 1926 in the village of Salem. He lived in Haifa between 1942 and 1948 and was lost for two years during the period of his stay in Haifa. After the 1948 Nakba, Shtayyeh returned to his hometown of Salem and worked as a volunteer in the village mosque until 1962, when the Ministry of Endowments (Awqaf) appointed him a khatib and an imam of the mosque. He retired in 1987 and continued to deliver Friday Khutbas and manage the mosque before he died in 1998.

The Ma'rouf Shtayyeh Collection contains numerous documents, most of which are texts of Friday Khutbas delivered in the Salem village mosque between the 1950s and 1990s, which discussed several Fiqh and religious duties such as fasting, prayer, Zakat, and Hajj, the virtue of certain months and days for Muslims, such as the inviolable months, and Rajab, Shawwal, and Ramadan, and calls made in many of the Khutbas for Muslim unity and the Islamic state, touching on some social problems and phenomena, and calling for the reform of society. The collection also contains a notebook in which Sheikh Ma'rouf recorded lessons for a training course he attended in the 1970s, and a construction plan for the village mosque.