Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani

Muhammad Taqi Usmani^[a] (born 3 October 1943) SI, OI, is a Pakistani Islamic scholar and jurist and leading in the fields of Qur'an, Hadith, Islamic law, Islamic economics, and comparative religion.^[2] He was a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology from 1977 to 1981, a judge of the Federal Shariat Court from 1981 to 1982, and a judge in the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan from 1982 to 2002. In 2020, he was selected as the most influential Muslim personality in the world.^[3] He has been conferred the title of Shaykh al-Islām for his knowledge in Islamic studies. He is considered a leading intellectual of the contemporary Deobandi movement, and his opinions and fatwas are widely accepted by Deobandi scholars and institutions worldwide, including the Darul Uloom Deoband in India.^[4] Since 2021, he has been serving as the Chairman of Wifaq ul Madaris Al-Arabia. His father, Shafi Usmani, was the Grand Mufti of Darul Uloom Deoband and migrated to Pakistan with his family after the partition of India in 1948.

Mufti Taqi ‘Usmani is one of the leading Islamic scholars living today. Author of more than 40 books, he is an expert in the fields of Islamic law, Economics and Hadith. For the past 35 years, he has been teaching at the Darul-Uloom in Karachi that was established by his father Mufti Muhammad Shafi, the late Grand Mufti of Pakistan. He also holds a degree in law and has sat as Judge at the Shari’ah Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is a consultant to several international Islamic financial institutions and has played a key part in the move toward interest free banking and the establishment of Islamic financial institutions. He is the deputy chairman of the Jeddah based Islamic Fiqh Council of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).