Hamza Yusuf Biography

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is an American Islamic scholar, co-founder and President of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California — the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the United States — and one of the foundational figures of the contemporary American Sunni traditionalist revival. Born Mark Hanson in Walla Walla, Washington in 1958 and raised in Marin County, California, he embraced Islam in 1977 at the age of nineteen and went on to spend nearly a decade studying classical Islamic sciences in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania, training under senior West African Maliki and traditional North African scholars including Murabit al-Hajj.

Returning to California in the late 1980s, Yusuf became one of the most influential English-speaking Muslim teachers of his generation through extensive lecture tours, audio courses, and translation work. With Imam Zaid Shakir and others he founded the Zaytuna Institute in 1996 — later transformed into Zaytuna College — to offer traditional Islamic learning rooted in the classical curriculum to American Muslim students. His translations include Imam al-Mawlud's Matharat al-Qulub ('Purification of the Heart'), Imam al-Tahawi's al-'Aqida al-Tahawiyya ('The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi'), and Imam al-Bayhaqi's al-Jami' fi Shu'ab al-Iman in selections, alongside numerous translated commentaries on the Burda of al-Busiri, the Hizb al-Bahr, and other classical Sufi and Maliki texts.

Yusuf's distinctive contribution has been to reintroduce English-speaking Muslims to the classical curriculum of the Sunni tradition — Maliki fiqh, Ash'ari creed, Maturidi creed, the moral psychology of the Sufi tradition — through accessible lectures and beautifully produced editions. He has been consistently named in the world's most influential Muslims list and continues to lead Zaytuna College alongside an active program of teaching, translation, and public engagement on Islamic ethics, civilizational history, and the spiritual life.