Shaykh Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi is a scholar of Islam from the Indian city of Jaunpur. He is a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Oxford.
Nadwi studied Islamic sciences at Darul-uloom Nadwatul Ulama, an Islamic institution at Lucknow. These studies included shari'ah, Islamic law; hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammed; and fiqh, codified legal rulings. He became a muhaddith, someone who has an in-depth knowledge of the narrators of hadith, and later taught these subjects at that madrasah.
He has written over 25 books in Arabic in the fields of hadith, fiqh, Islamic biography, and Arabic grammar and syntax. Most recently he has completed a 53-volume biographical dictionary of the muhaddithat, the female scholars of hadith. Expecting to find a handful, after eight years he had discovered more than 8000, from as long ago as Umm al-Darda, the wife of one of the companions of the Prophet .
He specialises in Ilm ul Rijal [the study of the narrators of Hadith]. He has Ijaza (licenses) from over 600 scholars, many of them the most renowned scholars of our time.
He lives in Oxford with his wife and 6 daughters.
