Hisham Kabbani

Hisham Kabbani (28 January 1945 – 4 December 2024) was a Lebanese-American Sunni Sufi Muslim scholar belonging to the Naqshbandi Haqqani Sufi order.¹ The Arabic article calls him a scholar and Sufi shaykh from Lebanon.²

Kabbani was born in Beirut, Lebanon.¹ He took a degree in chemistry at the American University of Beirut and a certificate in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) from Damascus.² He married Hajjah Naziha Adil, the eldest child of Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani, the guide of the Naqshbandi order, and holds an ijaza from Nazim to teach the order.²¹ Upon the order of Shaykh Nazim, Kabbani relocated to the United States in 1990.¹ He founded the Islamic Supreme Council of America and chaired it.²

Kabbani counselled and advised Muslim leaders to build community resilience against violent extremism, and in 2012 the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre named him in The 500 Most Influential Muslims.¹ His 1999 statement that 80 percent of mosques are run by "extremist ideologies" brought him into open conflict with major American Muslim organisations, which said his remarks could put the whole community under unjustified suspicion; a Washington Post fact check later concluded the figure had not been confirmed by any quantitative study.¹ In 2011 he co-wrote, with Homayra Ziad, a fatwa determining that the Quran does not condone domestic violence, and his fatwa on the principles of jihad was translated into Arabic and distributed by the US military in Iraq.¹ He and his wife directed disaster relief and humanitarian aid projects in Somalia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey, and he published many books on the Naqshbandi way, doctrine and spirituality, among them The Naqshbandi Sufi Way (1995) and the Encyclopedia of Islamic Doctrine and Beliefs (1998).¹

Kabbani died on 4 December 2024 at Fenton, Michigan, at the age of 79.¹

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