Nuh Ha Mim Keller is an American Muslim translator and specialist in Islamic Law. Born in 1954 in the Northwestern United States, he was educated in philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago and University of California at Los Angeles. He entered Islam in 1977 at Al-Azhar in Cairo and later studied the traditional Islamic sciences of Hadith, Shafi`i and Hanafi jurisprudence, legal methodology (usul al-fiqh), and tenets of faith (`aqeedah) in Syria and Jordan, where he has lived since 1980. His English translation of `Umdat as-Salik [The Reliance of the Traveler] (1250 pp., Sunna Books, 1991) is the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive the certification of Al-Azhar, the Muslim world’s oldest institution of higher learning. He also possesses ijazas or “certificates of authorization” in Islamic jurisprudence from sheikhs in Syria and Jordan.
