Yasir Qadhi

Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi is an American Muslim scholar of Pakistani descent, born in Houston, Texas, on 30 January 1975. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Houston, then hadith and Islamic theology at the Islamic University of Madinah, and earned his doctorate at Yale University with a dissertation on the writings of Ibn Taymiyya. He is dean of The Islamic Seminary of America, resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC Masjid) in Plano, Texas, and chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America. He is considered one of the most influential Muslim scholars in the United States and has consistently been listed in The Muslim 500. ^{1 2}

He was born in Houston to Pakistani Muhajir parents from Karachi. His father, Mazhar Kazi, was a doctor and da'i who helped found the first mosque in the area and published books and pamphlets on Islam; his mother is a microbiologist. When Qadhi was five the family moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he attended a British school; by fifteen he had memorised the Qur'an and graduated from high school two years early as class valedictorian. ^{1 2}

He returned to the United States and earned a B.Sc. in chemical engineering at the University of Houston, working briefly at Dow Chemical. In 1996 he enrolled at the Islamic University of Madinah, earning a bachelor's degree in Arabic from the College of Hadith and Islamic Sciences and a master's in Islamic theology from the College of Dawah. After nine years of study and work in Saudi Arabia he returned to the United States and completed a doctorate in theology at Yale University; his dissertation was an analytical study of Ibn Taymiyya's Dar' al-Ta'arud. ^{1 2}

Qadhi taught in the Religious Studies Department of Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, and was dean of academic affairs and an instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute, a seminar-based Islamic education institution. In early 2019 he moved to the Dallas area, becoming resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center and dean of academic affairs at The Islamic Seminary of America. ¹

He was a guest on an episode of Professor Henry Louis Gates's genealogy series Finding Your Roots on PBS. ¹

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

From Salafism to Wasatism. Qadhi's formative scholarship and early career were rooted in the Salafi tradition: he studied at Madinah and served fifteen years as dean of academic affairs at the Salafi-oriented AlMaghrib Institute. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and during his Yale doctoral studies (2005–2013), he began to question what he saw as Salafism's methodological rigidity and exclusivist frameworks. By the mid-2010s he had formally distanced himself from the movement and adopted a wasati ("middle-way") approach within Sunni Islam — as he describes himself in his 2023 Islamic Seminary of America text, and as academic studies describe him. ¹

The 2001 remarks and his retraction. The Daily Telegraph reported in January 2010 that in a 2001 speech Qadhi had described the Holocaust as a hoax and false propaganda, and had said that Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews. Qadhi had already, in 2008, admitted that he had briefly held mistaken beliefs about the Holocaust, saying "I admit it was an error," and affirming that he firmly believes "that the Holocaust was one of the worst crimes against humanity that the 20th century has witnessed." In July 2010 he joined an official delegation of eight U.S. imams and Jewish religious leaders to visit Auschwitz and Dachau; the imams then issued a joint statement condemning anti-Semitism and labelling Holocaust denial as against the ethics of Islam. ¹

The 2015 UK tour. The Times reported that Charity Commission regulators contacted three Islamic charities about Qadhi's 2015 tour, where he allegedly told students that punishments such as killing homosexuals and stoning adulterers were part of their religion; the report noted his clarification that such punishments were applicable only in an Islamic society and not to be applied in the West. ¹

The ahruf and qira'at remarks (2020). In an 8 June 2020 interview with Mohammed Hijab, asked about the perfect preservation of the Qur'an in light of the different qira'at and ahruf, Qadhi said: "The standard narrative has holes in it... The standard narrative does not answer some very pressing questions." He later insisted he was referring to the preservation of the qira'at and ahruf themselves rather than of the Qur'an, and published his views in the eighth chapter of Redhwan Karim's History of the Qur'an (2024), proposing what he calls a "Divine Permission Model" in place of the "dictation model." ¹

Threat from the Islamic State. In the April 2016 issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State declared Qadhi and several other Western Muslim speakers murtads (apostates), and he was threatened with death over his denunciation of ISIS. ¹

On hadith methodology (2025). In a podcast interview published in July 2025, Qadhi stated that Western academia does not consider the traditional Islamic isnad methodology for verifying hadith to be credible or compatible with the historical-critical method, adding: "I'm just being factual." ¹

His books include An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur'an (1999), Du'a: The Weapon of the Believer (2001), Riyaa: Hidden Shirk (1996), Seerah of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (2019), Lessons from Surah al-Kahf and Lessons from Surah Yusuf (Kube Publishing, 2020), The Sirah of the Prophet: A Contemporary and Original Analysis (2023), and Understanding Salafism: Seeking the Path of the Pious Predecessors (Oneworld, 2025). His research includes his Yale dissertation on Ibn Taymiyya (2013) and articles in Oriente Moderno, Political Theology and The Muslim World. ^{1 2}

His YouTube channel had about 732 thousand subscribers and about 128 million views — platform figures dated 23 January 2026, which change constantly. ¹

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