Speakers

Imam Wahhaj has been Vice President of ISNA U.S. since 1997 and has served on Majlis Ash-Shura since 1987. He is the Amir for Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). He is a past member of ISNA´s Planning Committee and has served as a member of the Board of Advisors for NAIT from 1989-1993. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors for the American Muslim Council.

After a year of studying Arabic in Cairo, Egypt, he settled in New Haven, Connecticut and continued his community activism, co-founding Masjid al-Islam, the Tri-State Muslim Education Initiative, and the Connecticut Muslim Coordinating Committee. As Imam of Masjid al-Islam from 1988 to 1994 he spear-headed a community renewal and grassroots anti-drug effort, and also taught political science and Arabic at Southern Connecticut State University. He then left for Syria to pursue his studies in the traditional Islamic sciences.

For seven years in Syria, and briefly in Morocco, he immersed himself in an intense study of Arabic, Islamic law, Quranic studies, and spirituality with some of the top Muslim scholars of our age. In 2001, he graduated from Syria’s prestigious Abu Noor University and returned to Connecticut, serving again as the Imam of Masjid al-Islam, and writing and speaking frequently on a host of issues. That same year, his translation from Arabic into English of The Heirs of the Prophets was published by Starlatch Press.

In 2003, he moved to Hayward, California to serve as a scholar-in-residence and lecturer at Zaytuna Institute, where he now teaches courses on Arabic, Islamic law, history, and Islamic spirituality. In 2005, Zaytuna Institute published Scattered Pictures, an anthology of diverse essays penned by Zaid Shakir.

He is a frequent speaker at local and national Muslim events and has emerged as one of the nation’s top Islamic scholars and a voice of conscience for American Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

He also founded Zaytuna Institute which has established an international reputation for presenting a classical picture of Islam in the West and which is dedicated to the revival of traditional study methods and the sciences of Islam. Shaykh Hamza is the first American lecturer to teach in Morocco’s prestigious and oldest University, the Karaouine in Fes. In addition, he has translated into modern English several classical Arabic traditional texts and poems. Shaykh Hamza currently resides in Northern California with his wife and five children.

His published works include Riya’a: The Hidden Shirk, Du’aa: The Weapon of the Believer, and An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an.

Yasir Qadhi is currently pursuing his doctorate, in Religious Studies, at Yale University in New Haven, CT. At AlMaghrib Instiute he teaches the Light of Guidance and the Light Upon Light seminars, which focus on aqeedah.

He first encountered Islam through Muslim contacts in the music industry. At the age of 17, he received a copy of the Quran, the Muslim Holy Book. He experienced a three-year period of exposure to Islam through local Muslim acquaintances as his life became increasingly dominated by his gang violence. His involvement in a drive-by shooting was his “wakeup call.” He then became a Muslim in 1992 at the age of twenty, and took the name Suhaib.

After converting to Islam, Webb left his career as a DJ and studied at the University of Central Oklahoma, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Education. He also studied privately under a Senegalese Sheikh, learning enough Islam and Arabic to become a community leader in Oklahoma City, where he was hired as Imam at The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City. He simultaneously starting teaching at Mercy School, an Islamic K-12 school in Oklahoma City. In 2004, he departed with his wife and children to Cairo, where he currently studies at Al-Azhar University in the College of Shariah.

Apart from his studies, he frequently lectures in the United States and United Kingdom, and records commercial lecture series on Islam and contemporary Muslim matters. During his time off from Al-Azhar University, he resides in the Silicon Valley of the San Francisco Bay area. Suhaib Webb is an active member of the Muslim American Society and its youth department and has been so for the last ten years. It is through the Muslim American Society’s scholarship program that he was sent to Egypt to attain fluency in Arabic and focus on Islamic studies. Additionally, Webb is a qualified instructor of the AlMaghrib Institute, took part in The Radical Middle Way movement, and blogs frequently offering Islamic perspectives on modern-day issues such as community involvement and social relevance.

Webb has widespread respect as a sensible Muslim leader. UK government officials were recently quoted in The Guardian defining Webb as a “moderate leader” along with the likes of Hamza Yusuf and Amr Khaled.

Despite being a full-time student, Webb continues his work as an Imam. He is a student of Maliki fiqh and a hafidh of the Quran in multiple Qira’at. Webb helped raise $20,000 for widows and children of firefighters killed in the 9/11 attack. Webb has been an advocate for grassroots Muslim activism to promote social change. He has also strongly advocated for an articulation of American Islam that is authentically Islamic with leaders that are acutely aware of the issues facing Muslim Americans.

He is very active in the Islamic community. Imam Magid is the Vice-President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and serves as a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Muslim, Sikh and Arab Advisory Board. He also occupies the Chairmanship of the Fairfax County Faith Communities in Action, is a board member of the Fairfax County Partnership for Youth, and is a member of the George Mason University Campus Ministry. Imam Magid’s domestic violence advocacy activities include serving as a board member of FaithTrust Institute, and as a member of the National Interfaith Planning Committee for Domestic Violence.

In May 2006, Fairfax County Human Rights Commission awarded Imam Magid with their Human Rights Award. A Sudanese-born American, Imam Magid is the son of the Grand Mufti of Sudan. At the hand of his father and other notable scholars, he studied and graduated in traditional Islamic disciplines, including Shariah (Islamic Jurisprudence) and Tasawwuf (Islamic Spirituality). Imam Magid views marriage and pre-marital counseling as his passion. He currently resides in Reston, Virginia with his wife and daughters.

After graduation, Shaykh Faraz traveled with his family to Damascus, Syria, to formally seek Islamic knowledge. In Damascus, he studied Arabic, Aqidah (Islamic creed), Mantiq (Islamic Logic), Hanafi Fiqh, Shafi’I Fiqh, Usul al-fiqh, and Hadith with a number of scholars including Shaykh Haytham Idilbi, Shaykh Abd al-Rahman Kharsa, Shaykh Abd al-Haleem Abu Sha`r, Shaykh Umar al-Sabbagh, Shaykh Jihad Brown, Shaykh Mu’min al-Annan, Shaykh Hassan al-Hindi, Sayyidi Shaykh Adib Kallas, Shaykh Muhammad Jumuah, Sh. Abd al-Razzaq al-Halabi, Shaykh Haytham, Shaykh Abd al-Haleem Abu Sha`r, and Ustadh Mahmud al-Bayruti. He is also the student (Murid) of Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller.

In the Summer of 2000, he moved to Amman, Jordan. Upon moving to Jordan, his teachers advised him to focus on teaching of what he had covered, for which they gave him encouragement and permission, and to continue his personal research and study. In 2007, he spent some time in Karachi, Pakistan, learning from the scholars there. In the Summer of 2007, he returned to Toronto, where he settled with his wife and three children. In Toronto, he is teaching through SeekersGuidance, both online and on-the-ground.

One outcome of this approach is that, over the past 12 years, I have developed and applied ethnogenetic layering and phenotype segregation network analysis as tools for identifying underlying substructure in complex populations. More recently, I have developed application prototypes of these novel techniques to a broad array of research questions, including environmental health, cancer health disparities, and hypertension-related issues. As a consequence, ethnogenetic layering and PSNA is now emerging as viable alternative to the racial model in many areas of health research. We are now investigating the merger of these novel theoretical innovations with technology, so as to broaden the appeal of and access to the multidimensional perspective of anthropology to non-specialists.

In 2002, I co-founded the first human DNA bank in Africa (based at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon) with the aim of changing the way that anthropological genetic research is done on the African continent (moving away from the colonial approach), enhancing local infrastructure and expertise, and dramatically improving the potential for scientific understanding of the interactions of genotypes and environmental factors in producing specific phenotypes (by providing a local context for data analysis and interpretation). With the cooperation of local scientists, we continue to amass a large and diverse database of African and non-African genotypes which is unique in its ethnographic detail. This research effort will upgrade the quality of genetic data on Africans (and its interpretation) by placing the molecular information within a sophisticated anthropological context.

I have also continued my research on the potential for coevolution among specific human and plant groups through studies of the impact of human exposure to bioactive phytochemicals on (human) metabolic processes and disease susceptibilities. As more is known about the geographical context of plant and human molecular genetic diversity, a fascinating portrait of the stimulatory impact of naturally-occurring plant chemicals (i.e., allelochemicals) on human diversity emerges. This research is a something of a natural analog to pharmacogenetics and promises to importantly illuminate our understanding of the origins and maintenance of human variability, a key interest in our discipline.

My research interests remain theoretical and applied. It is my goal to contribute to both areas and, most importantly, link application with theory, particularly within the area of applied biological anthropology.

Imam Naqvi is the resident scholar of The Jaferia Islamic Center located in Maryland, and is a spokesperson of The Council of Shi’a Muslim Scholars of North America. Further, Imam Naqvi is very active in motivating young Muslims, and has created the Jaferia Youth Group. Further, the Imam has worked on numerous humanitarian projects throughout the world.

Imam Naqvi is originally from Lucknow, India, where he completed his Masters degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Economics. Additionally, he completed a comparative study on various religions and subsequently obtained a Masters in Islamic Theology and Islamic Jurisprudence.

In April 2008, The US State Department hosted Abdul-Ghafur on an eight-city speaking tour of the United Kingdom to cultivate a conversation about Muslims in the West. On this tour, Abdul-Ghafur spoke at the House of Commons of the United Kingdom and the University of Oxford. She has accepted invitations to speak at a host of educational institutions including Harvard University, Emory University and Yale University. She has been a guest on CNN and National Public Radio and her work has been featured in The Boston Globe, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution and The New York Times.

In addition to work on behalf of women, Abdul-Ghafur’s was the Associate Director of Corporate Volunteerism at Hands On Atlanta, a multi-million dollar non-profit service provider in the southeast. She has been responsible for sourcing nation’s largest service day, Hands On Atlanta Day, which hosted 17,000 volunteers in 250 unique service projects.

Abdul-Ghafur came to Atlanta in 2003 to join the team that produced Azizah magazine, the first and only magazine for American Muslim women. Prior to Abdul-Ghafur’s work with Azizah, she was a program officer for Victoria Foundation. Victoria Foundation is among the oldest and largest private foundations and Abdul-Ghafur oversaw $12 million in grants to non-profits.

Abdul-Ghafur was selected to participate in the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow retreat hosted by the World Economic Forum in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006. The Forum convened thirty Muslims leaders from the United States along with their counterparts in Western Europe to strategize about the future of Islam and Muslims in the West. Out of this retreat came a commitment to address gender issues within Muslim communities in the West.

Abdul-Ghafur participated in the seminal events challenging the role of Muslim women in contemporary society. In 2005, she took on establishing women as prayer leaders, a concept that is unprecedented in the American Muslim community, and co-organized the historic woman-led prayer in New York City. In 2004, she participated in a civil action in Morgantown, West Virginia to give women space and voice in American mosques where they have traditionally been banned. To varying degrees, subsequent to these actions Muslim communities throughout the United States and the West have reexamined the ways Muslim women participate in community life. Mosques in San Francisco, New York City and Chicago are among those that actively develop programming for women, have taken down barriers between women and men and allow women to sit on mosque boards.