Eternal Creed Project

This project will put our successful presentation of the Aqidah Tahawiyyah into a book form, in a modern style, with examples and references which will be familiar to a modern audience and connect with them intuitively. Such a book will be an indispensable teaching aid to our sacred creed. The funds raised will help make this project come into fruition by providing the salary for the scholar, setting up an interactive website, creating the actual textbook, and more.

Support this project and help equip generations to come with the proper Aqidah of ahl al-Sunnah.

Shaykh Hamzah has already taught this text over a dozen times in the past two years and over 3,000 people have benefited from this 15 hour course online for free here.

Although there are a handful of translations and commentaries available which are rendered into various levels of scholarly quality and English, there is yet a need for a work that is not only a correct translation of the text into an accessible idiom, but also accompanied with a commentary that connect with the contemporary day-to-day life and challenges of our people.

Scholars who have supported the project on social media since the campaign started:

- Shaykh Faraz Rabbani, Toronto, Canada

- Shaykh Musa Furber, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

- Shaykh Shadee Elmasry, New Brunswick, New York

- Mawlana Bilal Ali Ansari, Chicago, Illinois

- Mawlanna Tamim Ahmadi, Union City, California

- Imam Dawud Walid, Detroit, Michigan

- Shaykh Taha Abdul Baseer, New York, New York

- Sidi Salman Yunus, Oxford, UK

- Mawlana Hamood Aleem, Toronto, Canada

- Imam Abdul Malik Merchant, Boston, Massachusets

- Mufti Ehzaz Ajmeri, Chicago, IL

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The terms of ahl al-Sunnah and Sunni are thrown around, increasingly not just by Muslims, but also the mainstream media and secular academia. Although, Sunnism increasingly is being taken by secular-minded Muslims and people of other faiths to be a cultural marker with some sectarian identity politics tied to it, classically that wasn't the case at all. Rather the Sunni tradition was a set of ideas, a methodology and a way of viewing the world which was the common currency of all Muslims who trace their ways through an unbroken chain to prophecy and revelation. From the earliest and most universally accepted summaries and attestations of what those ideas are comes from the renowned Egyptian Scholar of encyclopedic mastery of the sciences of the sacred Shari'ah, Abu Ja'far al-Tahawi (d. 321 AH, 933 CE) in his short work known as the Aqidah Tahawiyyah.

As those ideas are becoming obscured and lost to successive generations of Muslims, you will see what unites us as an ummah will weaken, leading to many problems. Far from being the first time in our history that a situation of this kind has occurred, whenever such a tribulation has hit the Muslims in the past, a group of upright and sincere scholars has stood to renew the faith amongst the Muslims, not through political, economic or social ideas, but through a renewal of belief and faith, which benefited the ummah in the hereafter, as well as in the aforementioned matters of this world. 

The English-speaking public is increasingly bombarded with all manner of extremism and misguidance. Our youth who cannot access classical works in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish or Malay, are being presented with choices for how they view the world from ISIS, materialists, secularists and other groups who will not benefit their faith, nor their life in this world, nor the next. There is an acute need for the rank and file of English-speaking Muslims in North America, Europe and, increasingly, around the world material of the Aqidah Tahawiyyah as an alternative to other poisonous narratives, which are harming the Muslims.

Please note: Shaykh Hamzah Maqbul teaches at his institution Ribat, which is registered as a 501(c)(3) tax deductible organization. This project will be conducted under Ribat inshAllah.

About Mawlana Hamzah Maqbul 

He was born in Whittier, California, and lived in Southern California until the age of ten when he moved to Blaine, Washington. After graduating from Blaine High School, he went on to attend the University of Washington and in 2004 completed a Bachelors of Science in Biochemistry and a Bachelors of Arts in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. During his study at the university he was active on campus, serving as the president of the UW Muslim Students Association

Shaykh Hamzah went on to pursue traditional Islamic studies, which took him to a number of countries, including Syria and Egypt where he studied the Arabic language, Morocco, Mauritania, and UAE, where he studied the madhab of Imam Malik, grammar, usul al-hadith, and the two renditions of the qira’ah of Imam Nafi’, Warsh and Qalun, and finally Pakistan where he had the opportunity to study tafsir, usul al-hadith, hadith, ‘ilm al-rijal and Hanafi fiqh. All of these studies culminated in him receiving an ijazat al-tadris, literally meaning “a license to teach” which is the equivalent in Pakistani Islamic seminaries to a MA in Arabic and Islamic studies, as well as an unbroken chain of transmission by which to narrate the hadith of such books as the Muwatta of Imam Malik, the Sihah al-Sittah (Bukhari, Muslim, Abu Dawud, Tirmidhi, Nasa’i and Ibn Majah), and the Sharh Ma’ani al-Athar of Imam al-Tahawi.

 He is currently at Islamic Relief, and teaches all the classes & programs held by Ribat.