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Travelling Light
Sh. Abdul Hakim Murad
Sh. Abdal Hakim Murad is one of Islam’s leading thinkers today. He 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, and then three years in Jeddah, where he he studied with Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad. He is the translator of a number of works, including two volumes from Imam al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din. He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications. He currently lives in Cambridge where he is a Lecturer at the Divinity School in the University of Cambridge.
Sh. Hamza Yusuf
Sh. Hamza Yusuf is a president, cofounder, and senior faculty member of Zaytuna College. He is an advisor to Stanford University's Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. In addition, he serves as vice-president for the Global Center for Guidance and Renewal, which was founded and is currently presided over by Sh. Abdallah bin Bayyah, one of the top jurists and masters of Islamic sciences in the world. Recently, Sh. 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).
Imam Afroz Ali
Sh. Yahya Rhodus
Sh. Yahya Rhodus began his study of Islam with Sh. Hamza Yusuf and visiting Mauritanian scholars. In 1998, Sh.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. In 2000, Yahya moved to Tarim, Yemen to continue his studies at the prestigious learning institute, Dar al-Mustafa. In the latter part of 2005, Yahya returned to the U.S. and served as a full-time teacher at Zaytuna Institute. In 2012 he completed his Masters in Islamic Studies and in 2013 he began his PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Sh. Seraj Hendricks
Sh. Seraj Hendricks completed his BA (Hons) in Islamic Law at Umm al-Qura University in Makkah. Graduated MA (cum laude) in Arabic from UNISA and is reading towards a DLitt et Phil in Arabic. He currently heads the Department of the Fatwa Committee of the Muslim Judicial Council in South Africa. He is currently Resident Sheikh at the Azzawia Institute in Cape Town.
Sh. Muhammad Mendes
Sh. Mendes currently serves as Founding Director of SacredService, Lead Arabic Instructor for Fawakih Institute, and as a Lecturer at Madina Institute. Along with specializing in Arabic, Sh. Mendes has been trained for decades in the classical Islamic sciences by notable scholars. In addition to establishing the Annual Rawdah in 2003 he has focused on translating and teaching rare Arabic manuscripts concerning theology, jurisprudence, ethics, spirituality, medicine, and metaphysics. Sh. Mendes teaches Islam rooted in its classical and intuitive traditions, positively engaged with modernity, and appreciative of human diversity.
Sh. Walead Mossad
Sh. Walead Mohammed Mosaad has been studying and teaching the Islamic sciences in the Muslim world as well as Europe and North America since 1997. He has been blessed to study with Sh. Ahmad Taha Rayyan, Sh. Ali Gomaa, Sh. Saeed Albouti, Sh. Bakri Altarabishi, amongst others. From 2005 to 2011 he worked with the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi where he developed educational initiatives to address the needs of new Muslims. He has lectured on various topics of interest, including Muslims as minorities, interfaith understanding, and the importance of purification and spirituality. He is currently a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK.
Sh. Idris Watts
Sh. Muhammad Idris Watts accepted Islam in 1998 in the first year of his Arabic Language Degree at the University of Leeds. In the second year of the degree programme, he set off to the ancient city of Fez, Morocco to further his Arabic Language studies. During this period he attended circles of knowledge and zawiyahs around Fez studying classical texts in Arabic, Usul ul-Fiqh and Theology. He also had the opportunity of sitting with the students of the late Sh. Makki bin Kiran who was a master of the ten variant recitations of the Quran and studied Tajweed and four of the variant recitations with them. He returned to England in 2007, and is currently the full-time Resident Scholar at the Abu Zahra Foundation.
Sh. Abdul Latif Finch
Sh. Muhammad Abdul Latif Finch converted to Islam at the age of 20 and has earned ijazas in Islamic Sciences including Quranic Sciences, Hadith, Maliki and Shafi’i Jurisprudence, Usul al-Fiqh, Seerah, Logic, and Arabic Grammar and Morphology under the tutelage of numerous scholars, including Sh. Hamza Yusuf, Sh. Salik bin Siddina, Imam Zaid Shakir, and S.h Yahya Rhodus. He currently resides in Berkeley, California where he is pursuing a Master's degree in Philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.
Imam Afroz Ali is the Founder and President of Al-Ghazzali Centre for Islamic Sciences & Human Development based in Sydney, Australia. Imam Afroz also conducts corporate training on a range of subjects, and utilises his corporate training skills to mentor and train community organisations. He teaches at SeekersGuidance, and also serves on the SeekersGuidance Management Team as the Managing Director. Imam Afroz’s studies have taken him from university-based academia to more traditional studies.He has received licences to teach from some of the most esteemed Islamic Scholars of our time. In 2012, Imam Afroz Ali was selected by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre amongst 'The 500 Most Influential Muslims'.
© 2014 by TravellingLight. In Partnership with the Cambridge Muslim College.
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