Farhat Hashmi

Farhat Hashmi is a Pakistani-Canadian Islamic scholar and preacher, founder of the Al-Huda International Welfare Foundation. ¹ Born in Sargodha in 1957, she took her doctorate at the University of Glasgow, taught at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, and built Al-Huda into a network of schools teaching women the Qur'an and Hadith in Pakistan, Canada and abroad. ^{1 2}

Hashmi was born in Sargodha, Punjab, on 22 December 1957; her father, Abdur Rehman Hashmi, was a scholar and a local leader of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, and her early religious education was at home. ¹ She studied at Government College for Women in Sargodha and took a master's in Arabic from the University of Punjab, Lahore; she and her husband, the hadith scholar Muhammad Idrees Zubair, held lecturer posts at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, before both went to Scotland for doctorates in Islamic studies at the University of Glasgow. ^{1 2} While teaching at the university she had begun informal religious classes for women, and in 1994 she founded Al-Huda International, a welfare trust teaching women to understand the Qur'an and Hadith and apply them in daily life; its diploma and certificate graduates number in the tens of thousands, and its dars lessons draw crowds of up to ten thousand. ^{1 2} The foundation opened the Al-Huda Institute in Mississauga, Canada, in 2004, and she emigrated to Canada in 2005. ¹ She became a television preacher on Geo TV, hosting Shahru Ramadan and Fahm ul Quran, always appearing veiled and teaching from her laptop — an image described in scholarship as joining traditionalism with media fluency. ¹ She is listed in The Muslim 500. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of what the sources give, not as a verdict of the museum.

Hashmi's stated mission is a renewal of Islam through direct understanding of the core scriptures: she encourages her students to interpret the Qur'an for themselves on strong evidence, favours women's participation in daily religious life — including praying outside the home and leading their own prayers — and holds positions such as permitting women to touch and recite the Qur'an during menstruation with gloves while learning or teaching. ¹ Her teaching has drawn fire from opposite directions: conservative scholars who deny that a woman can be a scholar and interpreter at all, and liberal and secular critics who judge her doctrines unbending and object to her defence of polygamy. ¹ On affiliation, the record is deliberately unaligned: the English article's infobox leaves her creed blank, its categories file her among Canadian and Pakistani Salafis, critics such as Raheel Raza have called her a Wahhabi, and the same article reports — citing Akbar Ahmed — that Hashmi and Al-Huda state they follow no particular sect and call themselves simply Muslims. ¹ Category filings and opponents' labels are not attestation, and her father's Jamaat-e-Islami leadership is family background; no two independent sources name a school for her personally, so no faith value is recorded for her. ^{1 3}

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