DIRECTOR

Mufti Mohammad Anwar Khan Qasmi (Director)

Born in 1979 in the district of Basti around 181 kilometers from Lucknow in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Mufti Mohammad Anwar Khan Qasmi obtained his early education in Persian and Arabic on the pattern of Darse Niẓāmī from 1st till 3rd in Baytul Uloom, a religious seminary in Bank e Gaon, in the district of Sidharth Nagar. Then he moved to Daru lUloom, Deoband, the historical Islamic seminary, and prestigious seat of religious learning, located in the district of Saharanpur, in Western Uttar Pradesh where he completed his graduation in Darse Niẓāmī in 2000 CE. Then he joined the newly launched department of Takhaṣṣuṣ fi al-Ḥadīth (Specialization in Ḥadīth literature) in Darul Uloom, which he finished by the end of 2002 CE.

Starting his career in 2003 as a language teacher, he established a private language institute in Deoband to teach Arabic and English to Madrasa students and graduates which he continued for the next 2 years. In 20005, he was invited to Bangalore where he joined the Islamic Vision Academy in which he worked as a translator and editor for the monthly magazine ‘Islamic Vision’ published by the Academy. And then he moved, at the end of 2009, to Deoband again where he established a translation and research center for translating the intellectual legacy of the scholars of Deoband into world languages especially English, Hindi and Arabic. During this period, he established a language company Indo-Arab Multilingual Pvt. Ltd. for the purpose of localization and globalization where he works with more than 30 translators and language experts. As a managing director of the company, he makes all major policies of the company and supervises and edits many of the translation projects undertaken by the company. This company has produced translations of more than 200 books into English, Urdu, Hindi, and Arabic on different topics ranging from Islamic law, morality, and ethics to history and current affairs.

In 2014, he started online Arabic classes to provide Arabic courses to those who, due to their busy schedule and office works, are not able to join a Madrasa and want to learn the language of the Qur’an at the comfort of their home. During the same period, he laid the foundation of the Islamic Research and Education Trust whose central goal is to carry out research on diverse topics relating to religion, ethics, philosophy, theology, and modernity etc. Mufti Anwar Khan has carried out translations from Arabic into Urdu of more than ten booklets and research papers penned by the great Ottoman Islamic scholar, theologian, dogmatist, and kalāmist Sheikh Muhammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, who held the post of the Deputy Sheikh al-Islām of the Islamic Empire.

Mufti Anwar was appointed as the Vice President of the Deoband Institute of Islamic Thought in 2017, and he took charge of the academic Arabic-English (bilingual) Journal of the Institute, ‘Islamic Literature Review’ (now Deoband Journal of Islamic Thought), as an Editor-in-Chief. He has traveled to many countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Malaysia, South Africa, Qatar, Nepal, and Saudi Arabia where he participated in seminars, conferences, and academic workshops on a range of Islamic topics. He has translated more than 60 books into English, Arabic and Urdu.