Mufti Musa Furber was born in Massachusetts and raised in Portland, Oregon. He majored in linguistics at Portland State University, with an emphasis on computational linguistics and cognitive science, a major that required him to study a non-Indo-European language. As good fortune would have it, Arabic was the only class that fit in his schedule at the time, thus starting him off on what eventually would become a serious and personal study of the Qur’an and Islam.

Mufti Musa embraced Islam and shortly thereafter embarked on a path of study. While still a student in Portland, he studied Shafi’i Islamic ethics and law (fiqh) with a Muslim religious scholar who was in Portland at the time. After graduating from college, Musa went to Damascus to further his Arabic studies. After a one-year return to the U.S., he returned to Damascus where he completed an intensive four-year study of the traditional Islamic disciplines–including Qur'anic studies, Prophetic traditions (hadith), ethics and law (fiqh), advanced Arabic grammar and the Prophetic biography (sira).

After graduation, he continued his studies with scholars in and around Damascus, who reviewed with him several important texts and qualified him to translate and teach them.

He then left the small village outside of Damascus where he lived with his wife and three children during this period, relocating to Cairo, Egypt, where he entered and completed a prestigious training program in the issuance of legal responsa (fatawa) at Dar al-Ifta’ al-Misriyya, under the direct supervision of Shaykh Dr. Ali Jumu`a, the Mufti of Egypt.