Apostate

About the author

Joram van Klaveren: Joram van Klaveren is a Dutch former politician and author. He served as a Member of Parliament in the Netherlands, representing Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom (PVV), and was a prominent critic of Islam during his political career. While working on a book intended to argue against Islam, he undertook deep study of the religion and ultimately converted to Islam. He resigned from political life following his conversion. He chronicled this dramatic transformation in his book 'Apostate,' published in English and widely noted as a remarkable account of a political and personal journey from outspoken critic to practicing Muslim. His story received considerable international attention.

About the foreword writers

Hamza Yusuf: Hamza Yusuf hafidhahullah (born 1960) is one of the most prominent American Muslim scholars of his generation and co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. A steadfast advocate of classical learning in Islam, he has promoted Islamic sciences and traditional pedagogical methodologies throughout the world. He serves as an advisor to the Centre for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and as a member of the board of advisors of George Russell's One Nation, a national philanthropic initiative promoting pluralism and inclusion in America. He also serves as vice-president of the Global Centre for Guidance and Renewal, an institution founded and presided over by Abdallah bin Bayyah. He is among the signatories of A Common Word Between Us and You, an open letter from Islamic scholars to Christian leaders calling for peace and understanding. His published works include translations such as The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi and Purification of the Heart, and authored titles such as Agenda to Change Our Condition and Caesarean Moon Births.

Abdal Hakim Murad: Abdal Hakim Murad is the Muslim name of Timothy Winter, a British scholar, translator, and academic born in 1960 CE. He embraced Islam in 1979 and graduated with a double-first in Arabic from Pembroke College, Cambridge, before studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo and pursuing further traditional learning with scholars in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, later adding Turkish and Persian in London. He is Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, which he helped open in 2009 to train imams and scholars in Britain, and serves as the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. He was a driving figure behind the Cambridge Central Mosque, one of Europe's first purpose-built ecological mosques. Rooted in the Ashʿari and Maturidi theological tradition and the spirituality of tasawwuf, he is widely read for his translations from al-Ghazali's Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din, among them the book on the remembrance of death and the afterlife, and for works such as Understanding Islam and the Muslims and his essays gathered in Travelling Home. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology and received the King Abdullah I Prize for Islamic Thought. Listed among the most influential Muslims in the world, he is esteemed for joining deep traditional learning to a thoughtful engagement with contemporary Western life.