Nouman Ali Khan

Nouman Ali Khan (born 1978) is an American Islamic scholar who founded the Bayyinah Institute for Arabic and Qur’anic Studies after serving as an instructor of Arabic at Nassau Community College. He has been named one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre of Jordan.

Khan was born in 1978, in East Germany to a Pakistani Punjabi family and spent his preschool years in the former East Berlin. His father then worked for the Pakistan Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where Khan attended the Pakistan Embassy school from grades 2 to 8. He described living in Saudi Arabia at the time as a “very innocent society for children”. His father moved the family to New York when Khan was in his teens. Khan struggled with his faith as a teenager and at one point identified as an atheist.