Yasir Qadhi Biography

Dr. Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi is one of the most influential Islamic scholars in the United States and the founding dean of The Islamic Seminary of America. Born in Houston, Texas, on 30 January 1975 to Pakistani-Muhajir parents who had migrated from Uttar Pradesh, India, to Pakistan after the 1947 partition, he spent most of his childhood in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he attended a British school and memorized the Qur'an by the age of fifteen. He returned to the United States and earned a BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Houston before turning to full-time Islamic studies.

Qadhi enrolled at the Islamic University of Madinah in 1996, where he completed an Arabic diploma, a bachelor's degree in Hadith Studies from the College of Hadith and Islamic Sciences, and a master's degree in Islamic Theology from the College of Da'wah. Returning to the United States, he completed a PhD in Religious Studies at Yale University in 2013, with a dissertation on Ibn Taymiyya's Dar' al-Ta'arud titled Reconciling Reason and Revelation in the Writings of Ibn Taymiyyah. He served for fifteen years as Dean of Academic Affairs at AlMaghrib Institute and taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis. In 2019 he relocated to Plano, Texas, where he serves as Resident Scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center.

Qadhi currently chairs the Fiqh Council of North America and is consistently named among the world's 500 Most Influential Muslims. His extensive YouTube lecture series — including a multi-year Seerah course covering the life of the Prophet ﷺ in more than a hundred episodes — are among the most widely viewed English-language Islamic content on the platform. His translation and lecture work has covered the foundations of Sunni creed, the lives of the Prophets, the Companions, and the major theological encounters between Islamic and Western thought.