Umar Faruq Abd-Allah

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Umar Faruq Abd-Allah speaks about the "Roots of Islam in America" at the University of Nebraska's Malcolm X Festival.

Umar Faruq Abd-Allah Wymann-Landgraf (born in 1948) is an American Muslim convert, born in Columbus, Nebraska to a Protestant family of the Midwest. His was christened Larry Gene Weinman and was brought up in the Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran traditions. He is the grandson of Dr. Joseph Ephraim Weinman, Professor Emeritus, and one of the founding fathers of the School of Anatomy in the College of Veterinary Medicine in the University of Missouri.^[1]

[edit] Career

Early in 1970, he embraced Islam in Ithaca, New York while studying English literature at Cornell University as a Woodrow Wilson honorary fellow. He then changed his field of study and transferred to the University of Chicago in 1972, where he received his doctorate with honors in 1978 for a dissertation pertaining to the origins of Islamic Law.

He taught at the Universities of Windsor (Ontario), Temple, and Michigan from 1977 until 1982, when he left America to teach Arabic in Granada, Spain. In 1984, he was appointed to the Department of Islamic Studies at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and taught Islamic studies and comparative religions there until 2000. During his years abroad, Abd-Allah studied with several traditional Islamic teachers. He returned to Chicago in August 2000 to work as general director of the newly founded Nawawi Foundation and, in conjunction with this position, is now teaching in Chicago and conducting research in Islamic studies and cognate fields.