Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is an American-born Muslim scholar and educator and president of Zaytuna College, which he co-founded in 1999 as America’s first accredited Muslim institution of higher learning. It was preceded by the 1996 founding of the Zaytuna Institute, committed to presenting a classical picture of Islam in the West and reviving traditional study methods and the sciences of Islam.

After becoming Muslim in 1977, he spent ten years in the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and in North and West Africa receiving teaching licenses in Islamic subjects. He then returned to the United States and earned degrees in Religious Studies and Health Care. Yusuf is the first American lecturer to teach in the Qarawiyin, Morocco’s most prestigious and oldest university; he also advises Stanford University’s Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union. Hanson was one of the 138 Muslim signatories of A Common Word Between Us and You.

Hamza Yusuf was ranked as “the Western world’s most influential Islamic scholar” by The 500 Most Influential Muslims, edited by John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin (2009).

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