Dr Ramon Harvey
Academic Lead
Dr Ramon Harvey lectures in Islamic theology at Cambridge Muslim College. He undertook his postgraduate studies at SOAS, University of London, and also holds an ʿalimiyya qualification. His publications include monographs and articles in both Islamic theology and Qur’anic studies. Currently, his research focuses on kalām in early Māturīdism and on constructive Islamic theology, especially in conversation with Christian theology, analytic philosophy and phenomenology. He is Series Editor of Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology, which is published by Edinburgh University Press.
Dr Abdallah Rothman
Programme Lead, PGCertHE in Islam and Psychology
Dr Abdallah Rothman holds an MA in Psychology from Antioch University and a PhD in Psychology from Kingston University London. His clinical practice as well as his academic research focus on approaching counselling and psychotherapy from within an Islamic paradigm and establishing an indigenous Islamic theoretical orientation to human psychology that is grounded in the knowledge of the soul from the Islamic tradition. In addition to his academic training he has studied privately with a number of traditional Islamic scholars throughout the Muslim world. Dr Abdallah is visiting professor of psychology at Zaim University Istanbul, International Islamic University Islamabad, and Al-Neelain University Khartoum and co-founder, along with Professor Malik Badri, of the International Association of Islamic Psychology.
Dr Salman Younas
Programme Lead, CertHE in Contextual Islamic Studies & Leadership
Dr Salman Younas’ research focuses on Islamic law in the classical and modern periods. Dr Younas graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Political Science and Religious Studies. After completing his undergraduate degree, he moved to the Middle East where he spent half a decade studying Arabic and the traditional Islamic sciences. In 2013, Dr Younas completed his MA in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford with honours. He then went on to complete a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2018. He was previously a researcher at the Oxford Department of International Development and the Hamad bin Jassim Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
Dr Belal Alabbas
Programme Lead, BA (Hons) Islamic Studies
Dr Belal Alabbas is a historian of Islamic intellectual and legal thought (7th – 15th centuries) and his research focuses on the hadith corpus, hermeneutics, and Islamic law in the formative and classical periods. He graduated from Al-Azhar University with a degree in religious studies and completed his DPhil in History of the Islamicate World at the University of Oxford. He previously held lectureships at the University of Nottingham and the University of Bristol and was a British Academy International Fellow at the University of Exeter.
Dr Aaminah Patel
Programme Lead, Arabic
Dr Aaminah Patel is a Teaching Fellow in Arabic at Cambridge Muslim College. She has over a decade of experience in teaching and studying Arabic and the Islamic sciences; she received her training in Arabic in Jordan and Mauritania, as well as at institutes in the UK. Her research focuses on the story of Adam in classical tafsir, exploring how exegetes reconcile the theological tension between prophetic infallibility and the common narrative of Adam ‘sinning’ or ‘falling from grace.’ Her work offers a nuanced perspective on the reconciliation of these concepts within Islamic intellectual history. Aaminah’s research interests include Prophethood in Islam, Sufi themes in Shakespearean tragedy, Shi’i and Sunni theological perspectives on infallibility, and the development of Qur’anic exegesis.
Professor Yasin Dutton
Senior Research Fellow
Professor Yasin Dutton is Emeritus Professor of Arabic Studies at the School of Languages and Literatures, University of Cape Town, South Africa. His specialist interests are the early development of Islamic law (particularly the school of Imam Malik), and the early development of the various readings (qir’a’at) of the Qur’an. His publications include The Origins of Islamic Law: The Qur’an, the Muwatta’ and Madinan ‘Amal (Curzon Press, 1999), Original Islam: Malik and the Madhhab of Madina (Routledge, 2007), and Early Islam in Medina: Malik and His Muwatta’ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), as well as numerous articles on early Islamic law, early Qur’anic manuscripts, and the application of Islamic law in the modern world, particularly in relation to economic and environmental issues. He is currently researching on the Diwan (collected poems) of the 9th/15th century Egyptian Sufi master, Ali Wafa al-Iskandari, as well as certain other early Shadhili texts.
Dr Amin El Yousfi
Teaching Fellow
Amin El-Yousfi completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge looking at how everyday Muslim pieties encounter and operate through processes of secularisation and neoliberlisation. His research was based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in France and the UK looking at the intersection between Islam, neoliberalism and secularism. He is presently a Research Associate in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester. In addition to studying privately a traditional curriculum of Islamic sciences with ‘ulama in Morocco and the UK, Amin completed an MPhil in Economics and an MPhil in Sociology. He then worked for two years as a Research Associate at the Moroccan Centre for Social Sciences (MC2S) before joining the University of Cambridge with a full Cambridge Trust doctoral scholarship. Amin worked also for two years as a Research Associate at the Groupe Société, Religion et Laïcité (attached to the CNRS).
Muhammad Husain Kazi
Teaching Fellow
Muhammad Husain Kazi is a visiting lecturer at the Cambridge Muslim College where he teaches the Quranic Studies module. Muhammad serves as a Community Imam and Liaison Officer at Ashford and Staines Community Centre and is reading for a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Cambridge. He is particularly interested in the theme of the Prophet’s exemplariness and the complex interplay between the temporal and timeless dimensions of the Qur’an. Muhammad completed an MSt at Oxford, an MA at SOAS, has spent more than a decade studying the Islamic sciences with traditional scholars in the UK and Jordan, and has also memorised the Noble Qur’an.
Dr Harith Bin Ramli
Teaching Fellow
Harith Ramli is a scholar of Islamic intellectual History. He studied at the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on the history of early Sufism. His research focuses on the formation of the Sufi tradition as seen against the wider intellectual context of Islamic intellectual history. He has been affiliated with the CMC since 2014, when he joined as a Research Fellow, and currently teaches modules on world religions and history. His teaching develops comparative approaches that connect classical Islamic scholarship with global questions.
Dr Engy Moussa
Teaching Fellow
Dr Engy Moussa is a supervisor of politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Tutor and Director of Studies at Hughes Hall College, and a Lecturer at Cambridge Muslim College. Her research interests include Islamic governance and politics, social and political movements, authoritarian rule, and critical security studies. Engy received her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge in 2021 and has been awarded the James Buchanan Fellowship at George Mason University in the US in 2023 and 2024.
Dr Safaruk Zaman Chowdhury
Teaching Fellow
Saf studied Philosophy at Kings College London completing it with the accompanying Associate of Kings College (AKC) award. He then travelled to Cairo studying the traditional Islamic Studies curricula at al-Azhar University. He returned to the UK to complete His MA at the School of Oriental and African studies with distinction. His doctoral dissertation was on the eminent Sufi hagiographer and theoretician Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021). Saf’s research interests are varied ranging from Sufism and Islamic thought to paraconsistent logic, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. He was lead researcher on the project Beyond Foundationalism: New Horizons in Muslim Analytic Theology funded under a John Templeton Foundation grant award in association with Cambridge Muslim College and Aziz Foundation. Saf is currently Academic director at the Centre for Islamic Knowledge in Toronto and is executive editor of the Journal of Islamic Philosophy.
Dr Ahmed Halil
Teaching Fellow, Classical Arabic
Dr. Halil is a Teaching Fellow at CMC. He holds a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature, as well as a Fellowship of Advance HE (formerly the Higher Education Academy).
With over 13 years of experience teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, he has taught a wide range of courses, including Arabic literature, speaking, grammar, and Arabic dialects.
In addition to his research in Arabic language and literature, Dr. Halil has also contributed to several studies on refugees and migrants.
Before joining CMC, Dr. Halil taught Arabic at several universities, including Selçuk University (Türkiye), The Open University, and the University of Oxford (UK).
Talha Ansari
Teaching Associate (Grammar), Classical Arabic
Talha Ansari began his studies of Arabic in 2012 at the renowned Arabica Institute in London, where he later went on to teach. He holds a BSc (Honours) in Economics from Queen Mary University of London, a Diploma in Management Accounting (DipMA), and a CELTA qualification from Cambridge.
He has taught English with prestigious language institutes in both London and the Middle East, working across CEFR levels as well as IELTS preparation. His passion lies in language and linguistics, and in developing approaches to teaching that connect English language pedagogy with the study of classical Arabic.
Sumayyah Tasnim
Teaching Associate (Speaking & Listening), Classical Arabic
Sumayyah is a Teaching Associate on the Classical Arabic Programme. She has studied Classical Arabic for over eight years in the UK, Palestine, and Egypt, and has been teaching for the past four years. Her focus is on enabling students to engage with fusha as a spoken and living language, rooted in the Qur’an, Hadith, and the Islamic sciences. Alongside her teaching, she works as a Policy Adviser in the UK Civil Service.
Dr Samir Mahmoud
Teaching Fellow
Dr. Samir Mahmoud is currently Academic Director of Usul Academy. Recently he was Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University. He has a BA (Hons) in Anthropology & Politics with a focus on multicultural theory and comparative religion, and an MA in Architectural History, Theory & Urban Design with a focus on the traditional townscape from the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. He also holds an MPhil in Theology & Religious Studies with a focus on comparative philosophy and aesthetics. He completed a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Dr Najah Nadi
Teaching Fellow
Dr. Najah Nadi is a traditionally trained academic with over two decades of learning experiences and over a decade of teaching experience. Her research focuses on Islamic classical theories of knowledge across disciplines of philosophy, theology, law, and spirituality, as well as fatwas and fatwa institutions.
Dr. Najah holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, focusing on the scholarship of the immanent Persian polymath Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390). She also holds an M.A. in Religious and Theological Studies from Boston University, as well as a B.A. in Islamic Studies from al-Azhar University in Cairo. Dr. Najah has completed several years of traditional training at al-Azhar Mosque, receiving teaching licenses (ijāzāt) in various Islamic sciences. Dr. Najah has served as a junior fellow at the Holberg seminar on Islamic history at Princeton University from 2015-2019, a fellow of peace and reconciliation at Virginia Theological Seminary from 2017-2021. Her teaching courses include Islamic legal theories, classical logic and ontology and Islamic spirituality and ethics.
Dr Sohail Hanif
Associated Lecturer
Sohail Hanif works on Islamic legal theory, with a focus on the Ḥanafī school of law. He received a MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, A Theory of Early Classical Ḥanafism: Legal Epistemology in the Hidāyah of Burhān al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Abī Bakr al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), studies the interplay of rationality and tradition in a major work of legal commentary. Sohail has also spent over a decade in Jordan where he studied a full curriculum of Islamic sciences with traditional ‘ulamā’. He was previously Head of Arabic Sciences at Qasid Arabic institute in Amman, an instructor in Islamic studies at Qibla online academy, and has taught undergraduate classes on Modern Islam and Qur’anic studies at the University of Oxford. He has also served as Head of Research and Development at the National Zakat Foundation.
