Yasir Qadhi (formerly known by his kunya Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi) (born January 30, 1975) is an American preacher, theologian, and Sunni imam. Since 2001, he has served as Dean of Academic Affairs at the Al-Maghrib Institute, an international Islamic educational institution with a center in Houston, Texas. He also taught in the Religious Studies department at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently the resident Scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center in Plano, Texas. He currently serves as the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America.
Born in Texas to Pakistani parents, Qadhi studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston, before studying at the Islamic University of Medinah in Saudi Arabia. Qadhi has written books and lectured widely on Islam and contemporary Muslim issues. A 2011 The New York Times Magazine essay by Andrea Elliott described Qadhi as "one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam." Writing in 2017, journalist Graeme Wood called him "one of the two most prominent Muslim scholars in the United States today." He has also consistently been listed in The 500 Most Influential Muslims, most recently in 2022. He has nevertheless been criticised for his views on women, and for defending high-profile Al-Qaeda supporters and the Taliban.
Qadhi was previously affiliated with the Salafi movement but has since left the movement and now only identifies himself as belonging to the "Post-Salafist" movement.
Early years
Qadhi was born in Houston, Texas to Pakistani parents. His father, a doctor by profession, founded the first mosque in the area, while his mother is a microbiologist, both from Karachi in Pakistan and whose ancestral homeland is Uttar Pradesh in India. When he was five, the family moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he attended local schools. By 15 he had memorized the Qur'an and graduated from high school two years early as class valedictorian. 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. He completed a doctorate in theology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Qadhi taught in the Religious Studies Department of Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee. He previously was the Dean of Academic Affairs and an instructor for the AlMaghrib Institute, 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
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 (fatwā) 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.