Muhammad Shafi Usmani

Muhammad Shafi Usmani was born on 25 January 1897, in Deoband, British India, to a Usmani family. His father’s name was Muhammad Yasin.  As a child, he played in the courtyard of Darul Uloom Deoband and sat in the company of his father, who was a teacher at the school.

He was a Pakistani Sunni Islamic scholar of the Deobandi school of Islamic thought.

A Hanafi jurist and mufti, he was also an authority on shari’ah, hadith, Qur’anic exegesis, and Sufism. Born in Deoband, British India, he graduated in 1917 from Darul Uloom Deoband, where he later taught hadith and held the post of Chief Mufti.

After the independence, he moved to Pakistan, where he established Darul Uloom Karachi in 1951. Of his written works, his best-known is Ma’ariful Qur’an, a commentary on the Qur’an. He wrote around one hundred books explaining the Quran and interpreting Islamic law.