Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani

Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani was born in 1943 in Deoband, India. He is the son of the late Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi, the former Grand Mufti of Pakistan. He obtained his Takhassus degree (an advanced degree equivalent to Ph.D.) in Islamic education from Darul Uloom Karachi, the largest and most renowned Islamic educational institution in Pakistan. He also obtained a Master’s degree in Arabic literature from Punjab University, and a law degree (LLB) from Karachi University.

He is regarded as an expert in the fields of Hadith (sacred traditions of the Holy Prophet, may Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him), Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), Economics, and Tasawwuf (Islamic spirituality). He has been teaching these and other branches of Islamic education since 1959.

He served as Judge of the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan from 1982 to May 2002. He is also a permanent member of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, an organ of OIC based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has served as the Vice Chairman of the Academy for nine years. He is also the Vice President of Darul Uloom Karachi.

He is generally known as one of the leading Shariah scholars active in the field of Islamic finance. For more than a decade he has served as chairman or member of Shariah supervisory boards of a dozen Islamic banks and financial institutions in various parts of the world. He presently serves as Chairman of the International Shariah Council for the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain.

He has held many positions in the higher echelons of the education sector of Pakistan and has participated in numerous commissions set up by the government of Pakistan in the field of education and economics. Since 1967, he’s been the Chief Editor of the monthly Urdu-language magazine “Albalagh”, and since 1990, he’s been Chief Editor of the monthly English-language magazine “Albalagh International.” He has also contributed articles to leading Pakistani newspapers on a range of issues. He has authored more than 60 books in Arabic, English, and Urdu.