Teachers

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Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

Hamza Yusuf is a cofounder of Zaytuna College, located in Berkeley, California. He is an advisor to Stanford University’s Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. He also serves as a member of the board of advisors of George Russell’s One Nation, a national philanthropic initiative that promotes pluralism and inclusion in America. In addition, he serves as vice-president for the Global Center for Guidance and Renewal, which was founded and is currently presided over by Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, one of the top jurists and masters of Islamic sciences in the world. Recently, Hamza Yusuf was ranked as “the Western world’s most influential Islamic scholar” by The 500 Most Influential Muslims, edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin, (2009). Read More »

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Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah

Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, hafidhu Allah, is an extremely well-known and well-respected scholar amongst scholars. In fact, he is a scholars’ scholar since many of his students are actually now considered scholars in the Muslim world. Read More »

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Ustadh Walead Mohammed Mosaad

Walead Mohammed Mosaad was born in New York City in 1972 and grew up in New York and central New Jersey. He attended the Rutgers College of Engineering and obtained his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1994. During his university years, he was active in the Islamic Society of Rutgers University for which he served as president. Read More »

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Shaykh Yahya Rhodus

Shaykh Yahya Rhodus was born in Kansas City, Missouri. At the age of 19, he embraced Islam in Santa Clara, California. He began his study of Islam with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and visiting Mauritanian scholars such as Shaykh Khatri wuld Baybba and Shaykh Abdullah wuld Ahmadna. In 1998, Shaykh Yahya traveled to Mauritania to pursue a full-time course of study, where he learned from some of Mauritania’s greatest scholars, including the distinguished, Murabit al-Hajj. Read More »

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Imam Zaid Shakir

Imam Zaid Shakir is amongst the most respected and influential Islamic scholars in the West. As an American Muslim who came of age during the civil rights struggles, he has brought both sensitivity about race and poverty issues and scholarly discipline to his faith-based work. Read More »

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Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah

Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Wymann-Landgraf) is an American Muslim, born in 1948 to a Protestant family in Columbus, Nebraska. He grew up in Athens, Georgia, where both parents taught at the University of Georgia. Dr. Abd-Allah did his undergraduate work at the University of Missouri with dual majors in History and English Literature. In 1969, he won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and entrance to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to pursue a Ph.D. program in English literature. Shortly after coming to Cornell, Dr. Abd-Allah read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which inspired him to embrace Islam in early 1970. Read More »

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Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi

Born in Damascus, Shaykh Muhammad descends from a family whose lineage goes back to the Prophet, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, through his grandson Sayyiduna al-Hasan, radiya Allahu ‘anhu. His ancestors also include some of the greatest scholars of Syria. His father, Shaykh Ibrahim al-Ya’qoubi (d. 1985/1406 H.), was one of the greatest scholars Syria saw in the past 50 years. Read More »

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Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

Abdal Hakim Murad graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983. He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. He went on to reside for three years in Jeddah, where he administered a commercial translation office and maintained close contact with prominent ulama from Yemen. Read More »

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Imam Tahir Anwar

Upon completing his religious studies in India, he has been serving as the Imam of one of the oldest masjids in the country, the Islamic Center of San Jose, since 2001. After teaching middle school at one of the oldest Muslim schools in the country for 7 years, he now sits on the board and teaches at the Averroes Institute, the Bay Area’s first Muslim high school. He also teaches Islamic Law at the renowned Zaytuna College, America’s first Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, CA. Read More »

Dr. Omar Mahmood

Omar Mahmood was born and raised in Southern California. He completed his undergraduate studies in Psychobiology and Arabic. He then traveled overseas to study traditional Islamic Sciences at Dar al-Mustafa, in the Yemeni valley of Hadramawt. His studies focused on jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, and sciences of the heart. Read More »

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Dr. Kamran Riaz

Dr. Kamran Riaz has a uniquely indigenous background in Islamic studies. Before high school, he completed memorization of the Qur’an within nine months at the Institute of Islamic Education, based in Elgin, Illinois. Since then, he has continued studying the sacred sciences with some of the most respected and renowned scholars in the Chicagoland area.  Read More »