Shaykh Sohail Hanif graduated from Imperial University in 2000 with a BA in Information Systems Engineering. He then spent over a decade studying sacred knowledge in Jordan, and became a teacher in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He was Head of Arabic at the Qasid Language Institute in Amman, and taught online courses on hadith, tafsir and Islamic law at Qibla Islamic Sciences.

He is now undertaking a DPhil at the University of Oxford, and has recently become head of the National Zakat Foundation's new research and development Initiative. CMC and NZF will be working together in the future.