Cambridge Muslim College appoints new lecturers

Najah Nadi Ahmad

Najah is an Azhari scholar from Egypt currently concluding her D.Phil. at the University of Oxford’s Oriental Institute. She is working on the legal and theological hermeneutics of the highly celebrated 8th/14th century scholar Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390) for her doctoral thesis. Najah specialises in classical Islamic law (fiqh), legal theories (uṣūl al-fiqh), and philosophical theology (kalām), and has also worked on aspects of the contemporary application of these fields (i.e. fatwas and fatwa councils, and professional ethics). She attended al-Azhar’s formal schools, graduating with a B.A. in Islamic studies, as well as al-Azhar Mosque’s classical reading-circles, receiving traditional licenses (ijāzāt) in several Islamic sciences. She also received an M.A. in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University as a Fulbright grantee. Throughout this academic and traditional training, Najah had the opportunity to work for and contribute to several research projects and religious institutions.

Najah’s lectureship is generously sponsored by The Aziz Foundation.

Sohail Hanif

Sohail works on Islamic legal theory, with a focus on the Central Asian Ḥanafī tradition. He received a Master’s degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he is currently completing his DPhil. His DPhil thesis studies the interplay of rationality and tradition in a major work of legal commentary. Sohail has spent an extensive period in Jordan where he studied traditional Islamic sciences with local scholars. He was also the head instructor of Arabic sciences at Qasid Arabic institute in Amman, an instructor in Islamic studies at Qibla online academy and has taught undergraduate classes in Modern Islam and Qur’anic exegesis at the University of Oxford.

Yasser Qureshy

Yasser has studied in traditional Islamic seminaries in Syria and Turkey, following the long established curriculum of Islamic sciences. During this time, he graduated first in his Arabic and Islamic Studies program from the Abu Nur seminary in Damascus, Syria. As well as being formally trained in traditional seminaries, he has further augmented his Islamic education with more focussed instruction with scholars such as Shaykh Ibrahim Khalil al-Ahsa’i, Shaykh Muhammad Shuqayr, Shaykh Mahmud Masri, Shaykh Muhammad Mujir al-Khatib, Shaykh Mashuq Yamac, and Shaykh Rushdi Qalam.

In addition, he has read for a M.A in Medieval Arabic Thought, and is currently reading for a PhD in Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge with Dr Tim Winter. His thesis considers some key conceptual doctrines of the early Ash‘ari school.

He has previously held an inaugural fellowship at ISAR, Istanbul, was Faculty Lecturer in Islamic Theology at the University of Istanbul, and has supervised undergraduate students for the Faculties of Philosophy and Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

“The appointment of three such gifted and authentic scholars is a major milestone in the College’s development, making CMC one of the leading centres of advanced Islamic studies in the UK today.”

– Abdal Hakim Murad, Dean, Cambridge Muslim College