Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Nuh Ha Mim Keller (born 1954) is an American Islamic scholar, teacher and author who lives in Amman, Jordan, and a translator of a number of Islamic books.¹ The Arabic article calls him a shaykh of the Shadhili order in the United States and a senior fellow of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan.²

Keller was born in 1954 to a third-generation German American family in the state of Washington, and studied philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles.¹ He converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism in 1977, and has cited the writings of the Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr as one of the reasons for his conversion.¹ He worked as a commercial fisherman in the North Pacific before his prolonged study of the Islamic sciences.¹

Keller studied the Islamic sciences with prominent scholars in Syria and Jordan and was authorized as a shaykh in 1996.¹ He joined the Shadhili Sufi order, becoming a disciple of the Sufi poet Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri of Damascus, from whom he received his authorization, from 1982 until al-Shaghouri's death in 2004; the Arabic article dates his taking of the order from al-Shaghouri to 1988.¹² He lives in Amman, where he established a zawiya in the early 2000s; at its height the resident community was believed to amount to around 60 families, with hundreds of visiting students and families.¹

His English translation of Umdat al-Salik, Reliance of the Traveller, is a Shafi'i manual of sacred law and the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive the certification of Al-Azhar University.¹ In 2022 he released a translation of the Quran titled The Quran Beheld.¹ His own works include The Shadhili Tariqa: Notes from the Hashimi-Darqawi Order (1999), Becoming Muslim (2001), Sufism and Islam (2002) and Sea Without Shore: A Manual of the Sufi Path (2011).¹

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