Evolution Theory & Islam: Letter to Suleman Ali

About the author

Nuh Ha Mim Keller: Nuh Ha Mim Keller (b. 1954 CE) is an American Islamic scholar, translator, and Sufi teacher who has lived and taught in Amman, Jordan, since the 1990s. Born in Washington State to a German American family, he studied philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago and UCLA, and embraced Islam in 1977 after a path that began in Roman Catholicism. He is best known for Reliance of the Traveller (1991), his richly annotated English translation of ʿUmdat al-Salik, a classical manual of Shafiʿi sacred law. It was the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive certification from al-Azhar, and it remains a standard English reference for Shafiʿi fiqh. He also produced Al-Maqasid, a translation of Imam al-Nawawi's concise manual of worship, alongside fiqh studies such as Port in a Storm, on the qibla in North America, and essays on the concept of bidʿa. On the Sufi path, Keller was a longtime disciple of the Damascene Shadhili master and poet Shaykh ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri, with whom he studied from 1982 until the shaykh's death in 2004, and who authorized him as a shaykh in the order in 1996. His Sea Without Shore presents a manual of the Sufi path. Through his translations, teaching circles, and a seminary he established in Amman, he has become a widely read voice for traditional Sunni scholarship and Sufism in the English-speaking world.