Advisors

• Anis Ahmad, Riphah International University, Pakistan
• Zafar Ishaq Ansari, Islamic Research Institute, Pakistan
• M.M. al-Azami, University of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• Mohd Kamal Hassan, International Islamic University, Malaysia
• Samir al-Nass, Fath Institute, Syria
• Muzammil Siddiqi, Fiqh Council of North America
  

Editors

General Editor
Muzaffar Iqbal

Associate Editors

Okvath Csaba

Muhammad al-Ghazali

Gibril Fouad Haddad

Zacharia al-Khatib

Aasim Ali Rashid

Assistant Editors
Basit Kareem Iqbal
Abd al-Hafidh Wentzel

Language Editor
Muhammad Isa Waley

Biographical Notes (Editors):

Muzaffar Iqbal is the founder-president of Center for Islam and Science (www.cis-ca.org), Canada, and editor of Islam & Science, a semi-annual journal of Islamic intellectual tradition. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry (University of Saskatchewan, Canada, 1983), but has been studying Islamic sciences for the past two decades. Most of his published work is related to Islam and Islamic intellectual tradition. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he has held academic and research positions at University of Saskatchewan (1979-84), University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-85), and McGill University (1986). During 1990-99, he lived and worked in Pakistan, first as Director (Scientific Information) for the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation and later as Director (International Cooperation), Pakistan Academy of Sciences.
He has published papers and chapters in edited volumes on various aspects of Islam, the history of Islamic science, the relationship between Islam and science, and Islam and the West. His publications include Islam and Science (Ashgate, 2002), God, Life and the Cosmos: Christian and Islamic Perspectives (co-ed., Ashgate, 2002), Science and Islam (Greenwood Press, 2007), Islam, Science, Muslims, and Technology: Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Conversation with Muzaffar Iqbal (Al-Qalam Publishing and Islamic Book Trust, 2007), and Dawn in Madinah: A Pilgrim's Passage (Islamic Book Trust, 2007). He is the co-translator of Volume VII of Tafhim al-Qur'an (Islamic Foundation, 2001). He has recently finished a detailed study of the Western approaches to the Noble Qur'an. He is also the editor of Ashgate's forthcoming four-volume Islam and Science: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives.

Okvath Csaba (Ahmad Abdur-Rahman) embraced Islam in 1985. He holds a PhD (2000) from University of Eotvos Lorand (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary, in Arabic Philology, for which his thesis was on the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya concerning the Beautiful Names of Allah. For more than 10 years he taught in different Hungarian Universities. He has travelled and worked in various Arab countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where he was a visiting research scholar at the King Faysal Research Center (Riyadh) in 2000. He has also worked as a visiting researcher at the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur'an in Madina. He translated the Qur'an and Riyad al-Salihin into Hungarian (A Kegyes Koran ertelmi es tartalmi forditasa and Az istenfelo kegyesek kertjei, respectively). His research interests focus on the Qur'an and its sciences including its translations, Prophetic biography, and the sciences of hadith.

Muhammad al-Ghazali is Professor and Head of Islamic Social Sciences Unit, Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, Pakistan. He obtained his doctorate from Islamia University, Bahawalpur. He received an honours degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies and went on to graduate from the eight year traditional Dars-e Nizami program. He is also a Hafiz of the Qur'an. He is the editor of Al-Dirasat al-Islamiyyah, a quarterly refereed research journal of Islamic Research Institute published since 1965 in Arabic. He has supervised postgraduate research by the students of the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence (Usul al-Din), International Islamic University, Islamabad and his publications include The Socio-Political Thought of Shah Wali Allah.

Gibril Fouad Haddad embraced Islam in 1991 in New York before completing a Ph.D. in French literature at Columbia. He taught at State University of New York at Stony Brook for two years and in 1997 moved to Damascus, where he studied the Islamic disciplines for nine years. He has published over 30 books on Islamic doctrine, Hadith and history, most recently Qadi Ibn Jahbal's Refutation of Ibn Taymiyya on Attributing a Direction to Allah Most High (AQSA Publications, Birmingham), The Four Imams and Their Schools (Muslim Academic Trust, London) and al-Suyuti's Remembrance of God (Amal Press, Bristol). He is presently working on Mulla 'Ali al-Qari's Major Dictionary of Hadith Forgeries. He has been graced with ijaza certificates from more than one hundred shaykhs from Algeria to Yemen.

Zacharia al-Khatib moved to Damascus, where he now studies and teaches Islamic sciences, after studying broadly in the faculties of science and humanities at the University of Alberta.

Aasim Ali Rashid is the Imam and the Dean of Faculty of Higher Islamic Studies, Surrey Jamea Mosque, BC Canada. He grew up in Edmonton, Alberta and studied shariah from 1992-1996 in Ajax, Ontario. He continued his education of higher Islamic Studies in India and then in Dewsbury, England. He specialized in fiqh after graduating in 1999. He served as a professor of hadith, tafseer, fiqh and Arabic sciences in Jaamiah Al Uloom Al Islamiyyah Ajax Ontario and established an Institute of higher Islamic education for men and women in Montreal in 2003, while being a visiting professor of hadith at Jaamiah Ajax and full time Imam at a major local masjid in Montreal. He has authored numerous books and articles on Arabic grammar, tafseer, hadith and fiqh. In 2008, he completed a specialization of fiqh and iftaa', as well as Islamic banking and finance from Jaamiatul Uloom il Islamiyyah (Binnori Town) and Darul Uloom Karachi, Pakistan, respectively. Presently he has established the BC Institute of Higher Islamic Learning at Surrey, BC and is the Imam at Surrey Jamea Mosque.

Basit Kareem Iqbal's research interests include political theologies, the politics of secularism, and the cross-pollination of Jewish and Islamic traditions with an emphasis on comparative hermeneutics and law. He is a graduate of the University of Alberta's interdisciplinary studies program in social-critical theory, an MA candidate in religious studies at the University of Toronto, and Assistant Editor at Al-Qalam Publishing.

Abd al-Hafidh Wentzel was born in Kassel, Germany, and grew up in the city of Duesseldorf. After finishing high school he worked with the Office for Youth Work of the Protestant Church until the end of 1977. His work with a German publishing house enabled him to travel across the world, including trips to Greece, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal, in the course of which he embraced Islam in 1980. The following years were mainly devoted to the deepening his knowledge about the faith. Over the course of the years, Mr. Wentzel has worked in television, as the central figure in the BBC documentary series Guests of God, as well as ARTE-TV's production Auf dem Weg ins Paradies (On the way to Paradise), both about the Hajj pilgrimage. Besides writing articles, editing, and running a small publishing house called WARDA Publications, based in Hellenthal, Germany, he has also traded in natural oils and traditional clothing. He speaks German, English, Arabic and Turkish, has worked as a pilgrim guide, and helped found, lead and administrate an Islamic institution in Germany. Currently he resides in Damascus where his main activities are in the field of writing, translation, editing and publishing Islamic classic and contemporary texts.

Muhammad Isa Waley is Curator of Persian and Turkish Collections at the British Library, London. Born in 1948, he embraced Islam in London in 1974. He holds an M.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Persian Literature from the University of London. He is at present head of the Research and Publishing Subcommittee of The Islamic Manuscripts Association. His main research interests are the bibliographic, palaeographic and codicological aspects of Islamic manuscripts, and the classical verse and prose literature of Islamic spirituality in Persian, Arabic and Turkish. He has extensive experience in the field of editing, having worked in this capacity for Dar al-Taqwa, Mountain of Light, Al-Furqan Foundation, Turath Publishing, and a number of eminent Muslim scholars.