Yasir Qadhi

Qadhi was born in Houston, Texas to Pakistani parents. His father, Mazhar Kazi (1936 - November 23rd 2025), a doctor by profession, helped found the first mosque in the area , while his mother is a microbiologist, both from Karachi in Pakistan. His father migrated from Jabalpur, present-day India to Pakistan. When he was five, after his father became assistant dean of a medical college, the family moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he attended a British school. At home, his family would do halaqas of the Qur’an and he had a private hafiz teach him. By 15 he had memorized the Qur'an and graduated from high school two years early as class valedictorian. He also helped his father with an Islamic publication. He returned to the United States, where he earned a B.Sc in Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston. ==Professional career==

After a short stint working in engineering at Dow Chemical, in 1996 Qadhi enrolled at the Islamic University of Medinah in Medina, Saudi Arabia. There, he earned a bachelor's degree in Arabic from the university's College of Hadith and Islamic Sciences and a master's degree in Islamic Theology from its College of Dawah. Qadhi returned to the United States after working and studying for nine years in Saudi Arabia. a seminar-based Islamic education institution founded in 2001. The instructors travel to teach Islamic studies in English. He moved to the Dallas metropolitan area in early 2019, becoming the resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center. He is the Dean of Academic Affairs at The Islamic Seminary of America. Qadhi was a guest on an episode of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates's television genealogy series Finding Your Roots on PBS. ==Views ==

Salafi movement Yasir Qadhi’s formative scholarship and early career were firmly rooted in the Salafi tradition: after earning a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston, he studied Hadith and Islamic theology at the Islamic University of Madinah, and later served for fifteen years as Dean of Academic Affairs at the Salafi-oriented AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and throughout his doctoral studies in Islamic theology at Yale University (2005–2013), Qadhi began to question what he saw as Salafism’s methodological rigidity and exclusivist frameworks. By the mid-2010s, he had formally distanced himself from the movement and adopted a wasaṭī (middle-way) approach within Sunni Islam, seeking to balance textual fidelity to the Qur’an and Sunnah with thoughtful engagement in contemporary social and intellectual contexts. Jihad Qadhi has presented papers on jihad movements. In 2006, at a conference at Harvard Law School, Qadhi presented a 15-minute analysis of the theological underpinnings of an early militant movement in modern Saudi Arabia headed by Juhayman al-Otaibi. The movement had gained international attention when it held the Grand Mosque of Mecca hostage in 1979. In September 2009, he presented a paper at an international conference at the University of Edinburgh on understanding jihad in the modern world. He said the specific legal ruling (fatwa) of the 13–14th century theologian Ibn Taymiyya on the Mongol Empire has been wrongfully used in the 20th and 21st centuries by both jihadist and pacifist groups to justify their positions. The paper has been critiqued by some Salafi commentators, who say that they in fact did not revise the definition of Jihad. Sufism and veneration of the saints Qadhi believes that the practice of some Sufi Muslims visiting the graves of Sufi saints and calling upon Muhammad and calling upon them for help or guidance is not shirk (polytheism) but said it is haram, sinful, an evil innovation, and called it a stepping stone and gateway to shirk but not shirk in and of itself. Ahruf and Qira'at On June 8, 2020, Qadhi had posited that the "standard narrative" in light of different Qira'at and Ahruf "has holes in it. That's what I'm gonna say. The standard narrative does not answer some very pressing questions." In 2024, he had published his views in the eighth chapter of Redhwan Karim's History of the Quran, referring to the "Standard Narrative" as the dictation model, the description of which was followed by contentions referring to Hadiths that Qadhi found incompatible with the model, with Qadhi then going on to posit an alternative model he referred to as the "Divine Permission Model" which he claimed to deal with these "holes" much better. In regards to religious liberties, Qadhi believes that Islamic teachings do not support or require that Muslim business owners discriminate or refuse service to LGBTQ individuals. Nonetheless, Qadhi expresses concern that Islamic institutions may face issues if they speak in a vulgar manner and employ or fire employees that do not conform to conservative beliefs regarding sexual behaviors. ==Death threat by Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria==

In the April 2016 issue of Dabiq Magazine, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant declared Qadhi, along with Hamza Yusuf, Bilal Philips, Suhaib Webb and numerous other Western Islamic speakers, as murtads, that is, apostates or blasphemers. ==Controversies==

Some of his statements have been controversial, including comments in a speech in 2001 questioning Hitler's motives in the Holocaust. He later stated that he regretted those comments and visited the Auschwitz concentration camp with a delegation of Muslim leaders. The following year The New York Times reported he said that most Islamic studies professors in the United States are Jews who "want to destroy us." More generally, he said that he "fell down a slippery slope", expressing anger at actions of the Israeli government in the form of anti-Semitic remarks he later recognized as wrong. The Times newspaper reported that British Charity Commission regulators contacted three Islamic charities about Qadhi's 2015 tour, where he allegedly made controversial comments and told students that "killing homosexuals and stoning adulterers was part of their religion." He also clarified to them that these punishments were only applicable in an Islamic society and were not to be applied in the West. On June 8, 2020, Qadhi was interviewed by Muslim theologian Mohammed Hijab, where he was asked about the perfect preservation of the Qur'an, in light of different Qira'at and Ahruf. During the interview, Qadhi said, "The standard narrative has holes in it. That's what I'm gonna say. The standard narrative does not answer some very pressing questions." His comments became fodder for Christian polemicists, became an Internet meme, and prompted negative reactions from Muslim scholars and proselytizers, leading Qadhi to private the video on his YouTube channel. Qadhi later insisted that he was only referring to the preservation of the Qira'at and Ahruf themselves rather than to the preservation of the Qur'an. His comments received significant blowback from Muslim scholars and laymen, and were frequently compared to his 2020 "holes in the narrative" controversy. A week after the interview was published, Qadhi made a statement defending and clarifying his comments, insisting that, while traditional Sunni hadith science isn't convincing to Western academics that rely on historical skepticism, he nevertheless considered the isnad system to be "one of the most precise and rigorous tools of academic verification in human history" and that Muslims "don't need 'the academy' to validate our religion." ==Works ==

Research papers • Reconciling Reason and Revelation in the Writings of Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328): An Analytical Study of Ibn Taymiyyah’s Dar' at-ta’aarod, PhD Dissertation, 2013, Yale University. • "The Unleashed Thunderbolts' Of Ibn Qayyim Al-Ǧawziyyah: An Introductory Essay", Oriente Moderno vol. 90, no. 1, 2010, pp. 135–149. • "A Christian Islamist?", Political Theology, vol. 14, issue 6, 2013, pp. 803–812. • "Salafı-Ash'arı Polemics of the 3rd & 4th Islamic Centuries," The Muslim World, 2016. Translations • Sunan Abu Dawud - first 2 volumes ==See also==