Adel Al-Kalbani

Adel bin Salim bin Sa'eed al-Kalbani, whose kunya is Abu Abd al-Ilah, is a Saudi Quran reciter and imam, born in Riyadh on 3 April 1959, corresponding to 25 Ramadan 1378 AH. He served as imam of the King Khalid Mosque in Riyadh for about twenty years, and in 2008 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia selected him to lead the Tarawih prayers at the Grand Mosque of Mecca, making him the first black imam to lead prayers there. From 2009 to 2021 he was imam of al-Muhaisen Mosque in the Ishbiliya district of Riyadh; he has a complete recorded murattal recitation of the Quran in the riwaya of Hafs 'an 'Asim, and a wide media and public presence. ^{1 2 3}

Al-Kalbani was born in Riyadh in 1959 (1378 AH) to poor emigrant parents who had come from the Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia in the 1950s; his father was a government clerk. After finishing high school he worked for Saudi Arabian Airlines and studied in the evenings at King Saud University. He studied with a number of teachers: his first teacher was Hasan ibn Gaanim al-Gaanim, with whom he studied Sahih al-Bukhari, Jami' al-Tirmidhi and Tafsir Ibn Kathir; he studied Tafsir al-Baydawi with Mustafa Muslim at Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University; he read "Akhir al-Tadmuriyya" with Abdullah ibn Jibreen; he studied the Quran with Ahmad Mustafa; and he holds ijazahs in some of the Quranic readings. In 1994 he passed the government examination for the appointment of mosque imams. ^{1 2}

Al-Kalbani briefly served as imam at the Riyadh Airport mosque, then became imam of the King Khalid ibn Abdulaziz Mosque in Umm al-Hamam, Riyadh, remaining there for about twenty years according to the Arabic article (some biographies say a quarter of a century). He had long dreamed of becoming an imam at the Grand Mosque; in 2008 King Abdullah selected him to lead the Tarawih prayers at the Grand Mosque of Mecca — the royal order assigning him was dated 4 Ramadan 1429 AH — and he first led on the night of 6 Ramadan, praying the last two rak'ahs of Tarawih and the shaf' and witr prayers. His assignment ended with the month of Ramadan, and he returned to Riyadh. ^{1 2}

He then served as imam of al-Muhaisen Mosque in Ishbiliya, north-east Riyadh, from the mosque's opening in 1430 AH (2009) until 1442 AH (2020–21). He describes himself, in a phrase the newspaper Anha' quoted from him in 2013: "I am a Qari, not a Shaykh." On 30 June 2013 he visited the Minhaj-ul-Quran centre in Ibaraki, Japan. ^{2 3}

Al-Kalbani has a complete recorded murattal recitation of the Quran in the riwaya of Hafs 'an 'Asim, hosted on Quran platforms including the IslamZoom page registered here. He presented the programme "With al-Kalbani" (Ma'a al-Kalbani) on Saudi television in Ramadan 2019, wrote articles for the newspaper Al Riyadh from 2012, supervised "Itr al-Kalam", the competition for Quran recitation and the adhan, and appeared in television programmes and interviews including Saudi Al-Ekhbariya, Kuwait Television and Al Arabiya's "Ida'at". ^{1 2 3}

In November 2021 he appeared in a promotional video for Combat Field, an attraction of Riyadh Season 2021, which drew wide reaction covered by media including BBC Arabic. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources, and the reactions to them. It is not a verdict by the museum; the museum records his later retractions here as the same sources report them.

In a 2009 interview with BBC Arabic, al-Kalbani declared Twelver Shia clerics to be apostates and said that Shia should not sit on the Saudi Supreme Council of Ulema; Saudi Shia figures, including Hassan al-Saffar and Abdel Karim al-Hobayl, demanded an apology or his dismissal. In 2019 he retracted the position after reading a book by Hatim al-Awni, saying he no longer considers apostates those who "believe in one God, eat our halal meat, and prostrate toward our Qibla". ¹

He issued a fatwa permitting singing, then retracted it in 2010, saying: "The singing which I authorised does not exist." In 2019 he again held that singing is permissible, pointing to hadith about singing in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, and in December 2015 he attended a religious singing event at which a flute was purportedly used. ¹

In May 2015 he tweeted that he was pleased that no church bells are heard in Saudi Arabia; on 16 September 2015 he criticised a poet's tweet that the collapsed Mecca cranes had "fallen to the ground in prayer" as "the stupidest kind of nonsense"; and in May 2019 he criticised mosque gender segregation that leaves women fully isolated, connected to the imam only by microphone, calling it a "phobia of women". ¹

The sources record that al-Kalbani has two wives and twelve children, among them seven daughters and five sons. The museum does not publish family details beyond what is needed to understand his work. ¹

Through the combination of the Ramadan imamate at the Grand Mosque, two decades of imamate in Riyadh, his recorded recitation and his media presence, al-Kalbani's voice reached a global audience, and his influence extended beyond recitation into public controversy. Platform figures change constantly and are recorded here only with a date; his YouTube channel stood at about 227,000 subscribers in the harvest of October 2026. ¹ His recitations, lessons and clips of his talks are also published on that channel, under the handle @youadelalkalbani. ⁴

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.