Isnad Academy Podcast

Mawlana Hafiz Qari Saalim Peck learnt to recite the Quran from his father, completed his hifz before the late Shaykh Muhammad Yusuf Booley, read the Quran to teachers in Egypt and Syria, and graduated from Dar al-Ulum al-Arabiyyah al-Islamiyyah in Strand under Mawlana Taha Karaan. He was the first at the Cape to read the entire Quran in all seven qira'at through the Shatibiyyah. Today he is an imam of Al-Jamia Masjid on Stegman Road in Claremont, teaches the Quran to adults, and directs the Quwwa Strength Academy.

This sitting follows the Quran from his father's voice to his own heart: the teachers who heard him, Cairo and Damascus, Strand and Mawlana Taha, what the qira'at are and how al-Fatiha sounds in the readings, and what isnad means in the age of AI. Then the two of us take the first Quwwa Strength Challenge on camera, because the body that carries the Quran has a right over us.

The Quwwa Strength Challenge: Friday 30 October from Asr at Al-Jamia Masjid, Stegman Road, Claremont. Five events, a team beep test, stalls and food. Everyone is welcome.

00:00 Cold open

01:07 Introducing Mawlana Saalim

02:21 First meeting

03:17 A father's voice

06:55 Parents and hifz

13:18 Sitting before Shaykh Booley

20:31 Egypt

23:01 Syria

28:02 Strand and Mawlana Taha

36:19 What are the qira'at

43:04 Al-Fatiha in the readings

47:17 Teaching adults

53:17 Isnad in the age of AI

58:55 Kettlebells and the Quran

1:05:53 Supporting Isnad Academy

1:06:28 Why train the body

1:08:35 Challenge day: 30 October

1:10:06 Closing

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NLmXeHoWCdk

ROOTED, the full series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c

Website: https://isnadacademy.com

Join our school community: https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about

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"They charged her with assault of a soldier, and the weapon was a baby."

In the closing sitting of this series, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick and Professor Farid Esack turn to Palestine, the struggle that South African Muslims have long carried as their own.

We begin with the open letter to the people of Palestine that Prof. Esack wrote, painted along the separation wall near Ramallah. Then: why every comparison with apartheid now makes him squirm; his first visit after the first intifada, and the stone he picked up from the rubble; what South Africa's case at the International Court of Justice achieves; the campaign that ended UJ's ties with Ben-Gurion University; why some ulama stay silent; the weak hadith of the "greater jihad"; and the lessons he wants the next generation to carry. Freedom isn't free: every generation has to win it again.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

1:01 Introduction

1:56 The letter on the wall

5:29 Why the word apartheid makes him squirm

9:45 How Palestine found him

16:20 At what cost? Cancelled in Hamburg

19:36 Why South Africa took Israel to the ICJ

26:40 Is the ICJ case worth it?

32:09 Tutu, and the apartheid comparison

38:18 Campaigns: BDS and UJ's break with Ben-Gurion

47:27 Why are some ulama silent on Palestine?

57:54 The weak hadith of the greater jihad

1:01:55 Humanitarian or religious?

1:05:22 Lessons for the struggle ahead

1:14:27 Free to be Muslim in South Africa

1:17:57 Freedom isn't free

1:19:15 Close

THE SERIES

Part 1, A Child of the Jamaat: https://youtu.be/yUwcDETGtqA

Part 2, The Janaza That Shook Cape Town: https://youtu.be/GXqgARV-xTU

Watch Part 3 on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ruh2BcWjR0g

SOURCES ON SCREEN

Letter footage: Sallie Shawl, November 2010. Desmond Tutu, "Apartheid in the Holy Land", April 2002. Hadith of the greater jihad: al-Bayhaqi, al-Zuhd al-Kabir no. 373, with a weak chain; al-Iraqi, al-Mughni 2:709. Ibn al-Qayyim, Madarij al-Salikin 3:226. Qur'an text: quran.com.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Professor Farid Esack is a South African scholar of Islam and a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle. He served on the leadership of the Muslim Judicial Council and the Call of Islam, taught at leading universities including Harvard, headed Religion Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and in 2018 received the Order of Luthuli in Silver.

ABOUT THE HOST

Shaykh Irshaad Sedick is a Cape Town based Islamic scholar in the Shafi'i school, a hadith specialist, and the founder of Isnad Academy. He teaches full time with SeekersGuidance.

Website: https://isnadacademy.com

Join our school community: https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about

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Mawlana Ibrahim Gaffoor has been the imam of Masjid al-Ikhlas in Hanover Park for thirty years and taught at Dar al-Ulum al-Arabiyyah al-Islamiyyah in Strand for twenty-two, across the staff room from Mawlana Taha Karaan. His students called him Mawlana Gaff. He taught this episode's host, and he was the one who took him by the hand and showed him how to wash the dead.

This sitting is his own chain: Ante Haya and Imam Jassiem in Hanover Park, Boeta Qasim Ali's after-school madrasah, Sheikh Musa Titus, Imam Abu Bakr Simon, Sheikh Hanif Moos, Dar al-Ulum Zakariyya and Newcastle, Mawlana Qasim Sema's counsels, and what it costs to be a community's imam when nobody sees the one o'clock house calls.

00:00 Nobody sees that

00:26 Welcome: the teacher we called Mawlana Gaff

04:11 Where it began: Ante Haya, Imam Jassiem, Boeta Qasim Ali

09:45 Arabic with Imam Abu Bakr Simon; building the masjid

15:01 An engraving on a rock

18:13 Sheikh Hanif Moos, Bulugh al-Maram, Zakariyya

19:49 The urge to study: the Darul Ulum route

23:54 Mawlana Faruq Patel, the walking Quran

27:54 A piece of paper doesn't make you an alim

28:37 Mawlana Sema: this is only the key to ilm

30:45 What kind of student: Imam al-Shafi'i's six

34:05 Jalalayn, from Strand to the Haram

36:12 How he came to teach at Strand

42:42 Mawlana Taha in the staff room

48:08 Imamat: a slave of the community

52:08 Match, patch, hatch

54:55 Why underpaying scholars is dangerous

57:32 One night at one o'clock: nobody sees that

59:50 Imamat then and now; the Afrikaans-Arabic kitab

1:04:35 Mawlana Sema's three counsels; Rumi and the well

1:09:33 The Darul Ulum washes dirty clothes

1:11:02 Advice to young ulama

1:12:09 Don't wait for the eulogies; du'a for your teachers

1:16:25 Stop arguing: have your akhirah in mind

1:17:52 The close, and a kaffarah for the rain

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/p_gSHgF7io0

ROOTED, the full series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c

Website: https://isnadacademy.com

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Mawlana Khalil Hendricks left a corporate career in Johannesburg for Syria on the strength of an ayah that would not leave him alone: people who meet the angels having wronged themselves, and whose excuse is that they were made weak in the place where they were. He came back and built, with Mu'allimah Radia Bawa Hendricks, a set of institutions that now runs from a Sunday class for adults who cannot read the Qur'an to a school of 240 students.

This sitting is about what it costs to stay, and what isnad means once you stop being the student.

00:00 If you pay me a million a month

00:42 Mawlana Khalil Hendricks

02:43 A world I did not know

06:05 The first trip lands

09:01 One day I will read the Ihya in Arabic

10:03 The verse that haunted him

12:38 Syria before the war

14:47 What was lost, and what it cost

19:19 Coming back, and what had changed

21:20 Some people are so poor, the only thing they have is money

24:07 Marriage, and a new era of study

29:29 Encountering Mawlana Taha Karaan's manhaj

31:42 The scholar is the prisoner of the evidence

33:12 The counsel he kept giving

36:49 The bridging is the difficult part

40:27 Mizan, and the Qur'an without a filter

46:45 Itikaf, and the third space

52:23 InLight, and asking what they needed

1:01:56 GoodTree began at home

1:09:47 An environment steeped in kufr

1:13:46 Like an ice block in the sun

1:16:59 Sitting inside the transmission

1:18:07 Isnad is the grounding of who you are

1:21:10 Money, assets, and standing on your own

1:24:09 Let us turn every house of Allah into a school

1:25:05 AI, universities, and the value of school

1:30:11 Isnad is also what you build

1:32:55 Recognition is from Allah

HIS WORK

Mizan Institute https://mizan.co.za

GoodTree Quranic School https://goodtree.co.za

Zahraa Institute https://zahraa.co.za

InLight Foundation https://inlight.org.za

ROOTED

Every episode https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c

Website https://isnadacademy.com

Join our school community https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about

Support our work https://payf.st/sfr4x

Podcast https://redcircle.com/shows/isnad-academy

"We resisted at a time when it was not fashionable." Everybody claims the struggle afterwards; very few were in it.

In the second sitting of this series, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick takes up the story where Part 1 left off: Farid Esack comes home from eight years in the madrasas of Karachi to a country about to catch fire. He joins the Muslim Judicial Council and drafts its constitution. He helps found the Call of Islam. He throws in his lot with the UDF — and answers the scholars of the time who said Muslims have no business in politics, and the movement men who said an alliance with non-Muslims dilutes the din.

At the centre of the episode is a story he tells here in full for the first time: the Salt River janaza of Ebrahim Carelse, a bystander shot by police in 1985. Ten thousand people marched under State of Emergency regulations, a crowd turned on a policeman, and a young mawlana threw himself over the man's body — and then had to decide whether to get up.

Then 1994, the Commission for Gender Equality, and in 2018 the Order of Luthuli — and what a boy from Bontheuwel says to himself when a president hangs a medal around his neck.

This episode contains testimony about police violence, torture and mob violence during apartheid. It is told plainly and without graphic detail, but some listeners may find it distressing.

Shaykh Irshaad and Professor Esack come from different worlds of learning and do not agree on everything. You do not have to agree with a man on everything to sit with him and honour what he has carried.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:55 Introduction

2:11 Coming home to a country about to catch fire

9:52 Inside the MJC, and drafting its constitution

17:28 Shaykh Nazim, and how we remember people

21:23 Were the ulama divided about politics?

33:34 "Muslims don't get involved in politics"

37:40 Was there a moment you crossed over?

41:30 Why found the Call of Islam

45:42 What did the struggle actually cost?

51:32 The Salt River janaza of Ebrahim Carelse

1:17:23 1994: Commissioner for Gender Equality

1:20:13 The Order of Luthuli, 2018

1:26:15 "I do believe that I am a miracle"

1:31:15 Why he finds it hard to make du'a

1:34:07 Closing, and what comes in Part 3

ABOUT THE GUEST

Professor Farid Esack is a South African scholar of Islam, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and one of the most widely read Muslim academic voices from this country. He served the Muslim Judicial Council, co-founded the Call of Islam, was Commissioner for Gender Equality in the democratic South Africa, and in 2018 received the Order of Luthuli in Silver.

ABOUT THE HOST

Shaykh Irshaad Sedick is a Cape Town–based Islamic scholar in the Shafi'i school, a hadith student, and the founder of Isnad Academy. He teaches full-time with SeekersGuidance.

Isnad Academy connects the global Muslim community to authenticated Islamic scholarship — live teaching, recorded courses, and conversations like this one.

#FaridEsack #IslamInSouthAfrica #IsnadAcademy #CapeTown #Apartheid #CallOfIslam #UDF #MuslimJudicialCouncil

Shaykhah Ruqayyah Samsodien flew to Damascus at eighteen and hung a sign around her neck in the dormitory that read, in bubble letters, "I don't speak English" — so that nobody would speak to her in it, and she would be forced into Arabic.

She came home an alimah.

In this episode of ROOTED, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick sits with one of the very few fully qualified female scholars in South Africa: a hafizah at thirteen, the only girl in a full-time class at a time when that was not done; a graduate of Abu al-Nur and of al-Fath University in Damascus, where she sat before Shaykh Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan al-Buti (Allah have mercy on him) and Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi; a student of Shaykh Abu al-Hasan Muhy al-Din al-Kurdi, from whom she took her ijazah in the Quran directly; and today the director of Baseerah Institute in Cape Town.

We trace the whole road: her mother's dua in 1984 for a child who would carry the Quran; the afternoon in 1996 when Shaykh Muhammad Yusuf Booley called her parents in; fifteen juz in the first year; Damascus, the dormitory, the matrons, and a wish made as a child at the grave of Abu al-Darda (Allah be pleased with him) that was answered on a cobblestone road; being called in to the Muslim Judicial Council before coming home and told not to try to change Cape Town in one go; and the Mauritanian mahdarah that now sits with her students in Arabic.

Her chain, from Al-Tanzil's Database of Sanad Holders, is drawn on screen: from Ibrahim al-Ubaydi down through the Hulwanis and Shaykhah Anisah Mayyas to her.

And the line the episode closes on, to every girl who never thought this was open to her: "But now the road is open. We have paved the way. It's now only for you to take it, in sha Allah."

ROOTED is Isnad Academy's interview series on how authentic Islamic knowledge is transmitted — teacher to student, in an unbroken chain back to the Prophet ﷺ — and why that matters in an age of unvetted online content.

▶ Join our school community: https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about

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▶ Podcast: https://redcircle.com/shows/isnad-academy

▶ ROOTED, the full series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c

▶ Website: https://isnadacademy.com

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open — "I don't speak English"

0:26 Salam, and who she is

3:18 Shaykhah or Muallimah? The title question

5:18 Her mother's dua, 1984

5:54 The afternoon Shaykh Booley called her parents in

8:32 The only girl in a full-time class

12:25 Shaykh Muhammad Yusuf Booley

17:30 Fifteen juz, and the simplicity of that time

21:12 Damascus at eighteen — and the sign around her neck

22:52 Fusha, ammiyyah, and learning to speak

24:32 al-Fath University, and Shaykh al-Buti

31:56 Abu al-Darda and the cobblestone road

34:16 Damascus now, and what the people need

43:16 The dorm, the matrons, the discipline

45:27 "You're the only one who knows who they are"

47:30 Called in to the MJC before coming home

49:20 The ijazah, from Shaykh Muhy al-Din al-Kurdi

50:30 Jamiyyat al-Qurra and Dar al-Naim

51:20 Shaykh al-Mishri and the Mauritanian mahdarah

53:00 Baseerah Institute

56:50 What the women are studying now

59:10 Islamia, the imtihan, and the overseas option

1:02:30 What is being lost

1:07:30 Her ijazat and her shuyukh

1:09:10 The Damascus teachers

1:10:30 Sayyid Ahmad al-Kaf and the Yemeni line

1:11:30 Shaykh Hasan al-Khadim

1:14:26 Taking directly from the scholars

1:16:12 The noor that comes with it

1:20:15 To the girl who never thought she could

1:21:20 Imam Shafi'i: "he narrated to us"

1:22:30 "Now the road is open"

Terms explained on screen: hifz, huffaz, juz, ijazah, isnad, sanad, qurra, tajwid, fusha, ammiyyah, nahw, sarf, muallimah, shaykhah, alimah, mahdarah, talaqqi, takhrij, amanah ilmiyyah, and more.

Sources shown on screen: Al-Tanzil Institute, Database of Sanad Holders: Cape Town (10th print, 2021), p.62 and p.216; Imam Shafi'i's verse as given by Ibn Kathir in al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya.

#Rooted #IsnadAcademy #Isnad #CapeTown #Damascus #Ulama #FemaleScholars #IslamicScholarship #Hifz #Ijazah #BaseerahInstitute #Syria #Mauritania

Mawlana Ashraf Lamara holds one of the shortest chains of transmission to Sahih al-Bukhari in the world — four links to Shah Waliullah al-Dihlawi — and until last year almost nobody outside a handful of scholars knew it.

In this episode of Rooted, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick sits with one of Cape Town's senior ulama: a founding teacher of Qaasimul Uloom, who has taught there since its first day in 1998; former imam of Lost City (Tafelsig) and Montrose Park in Mitchells Plain; founder of the Darul Furqan hifz programme; and a student of the legendary Mawlana Qasim Sema of Darul Uloom Newcastle.

We trace the whole journey: a Tabligh household in Hanover Park, memorising Qur'an at Mia's Farm at thirteen, Darul Uloom Newcastle in 1987, the teachers who shaped him, the Dawrah year, and how Mawlana Sema's Bukhari teacher at Dabhel — a scholar already in his nineties — handed down a chain that runs through Fadl al-Rahman Ganj Muradabadi, the last living student of Shah Abdul Aziz. Both of Mawlana Sema's sanads appear on screen, read from his own handwriting and from Mawlana Lamara's ijazah.

And the reason it matters now, in his words: "Today it's not about what is being said. Today you have to focus on who said it. Seeing is no more believing — and hearing has always been deceiving."

Rooted is Isnad Academy's interview series on how authentic Islamic knowledge is transmitted — teacher to student, in an unbroken chain back to the Prophet ﷺ — and why that matters in an age of unvetted online content.

▶ Join our school community: [https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about]

Support our work: [https://payf.st/sfr4x]

Podcast: https://redcircle.com/shows/isnad-academy

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c

Key terms explained on screen in this episode: sanad, isnad, samāʿ, ijāzah, ʿuluww al-isnād (the "high" chain), Dawrat al-Hadith, Dars-e-Nizami, takrār and mutālaʿah, and more.

Sources shown on screen: Mawlana Qasim Sema's handwritten sanad (Darul Uloom Newcastle); the Qaasimul Uloom ijazah for the narration of Sahih al-Bukhari (2024); Sahih al-Bukhari 71; al-Baqarah 2:132.

#Rooted #IsnadAcademy #Isnad #Hadith #SahihBukhari #CapeTown #Ulama #IslamicScholarship #QaasimulUloom #DarulUloomNewcastle

0:00 Seeing is no more believing

0:26 Welcome — one of our senior ulama

1:27 The seed: a Tabligh home in Hanover Park

5:24 Mia's Farm at thirteen

8:03 Arriving at Darul Uloom Newcastle

9:51 A naughty boy, a serious student

13:24 Mawlana Sema and the teachers who shaped him

15:58 The Dawrah year: reading the Six Books

21:11 The shortest sanad to Sahih al-Bukhari

28:00 Passing the sanad on: England, Karabogha, Peshawar

30:53 A year in Jamaat, then home

34:18 Founding Qaasimul Uloom

37:10 What to expect when you walk in

40:29 What is isnad — and why it matters in the age of AI

43:26 Students, phones and lost istiʿdād

46:48 What gives him hope

49:05 Advice to young ulama: find a mentor

51:35 Darul Furqan: sixteen years without a hafiz

55:02 A final word to the Ummah

58:35 Closing du'a

When I was eleven years old, I walked into an afternoon madrasa in Retreat, and the man at the front of that room was the first qualified Islamic scholar I ever had as a teacher. He is the reason I wanted to become an alim. He is the reason I found Darun Na’im. And when I wanted to leave school in Grade 10 to study full-time, he and my father sat down together and decided I would finish school first.

In this episode of ROOTED, I sit across from my own teacher, Mawlana Zakariyah Philander, and ask him for the whole journey.

He tells it plainly: walking to the masjid in a kufi as a teenager while his friends went to school, and the neighbours asking what he thought he was doing. Every application to Medina, Makkah and Malaysia coming back closed. Resigning his job, fixing the radiator on his Honda, driving 1,500 kilometres alone to Darul Uloom Newcastle — and being turned away at the door, twice, before they let him in. Six years later, he took his sanad of Bukhari from the same man who turned him away.

Then, the part that matters most to this series. What a teacher carries that a page cannot. Why the tradition insists you sit at someone’s feet. What the student who understood none of it still walks away with. And why, in his words, you must never make an idol of the man who taught you.

ROOTED is the Isnad Academy series where we sit with the scholars of South Africa and trace how knowledge actually travelled — from a teacher, to a student, to you.

— CHAPTERS —

0:00 The athar of the exchange

0:28 Welcome: a link in my own chain

4:03 Retreat: a madrasa before there was a masjid

7:16 His father, and his first teacher

8:15 Was there a moment you decided?

10:38 Walking to the masjid in a kufi

14:25 The gems who told us there was more

17:42 His teachers, one by one

21:47 Medina, Makkah, Malaysia: every door closed

23:03 Leaving the job, driving to Newcastle

24:40 And he dismissed the letter

27:24 Deoband: humility before knowledge

30:04 The dawra, and what it does to a person

32:20 Teachers who disagreed with each other

34:29 How he came to Darun Naim

40:44 You have to be able to teach children

43:34 Darun Naim when it was a novel idea

52:39 Where the contextual reading came from

57:46 Guardrails for a young scholar

1:04:14 What the communities taught him

1:12:59 Two kinds of scholar

1:14:32 Learning from a screen: what is lost

1:18:20 A transference of light

1:24:44 Never make an idol of a teacher

1:30:34 The tradition and the academy

1:38:59 What does a grounded scholar have to fear?

1:44:45 To an eleven-year-old walking in

1:46:31 Consumer, or architect

1:51:04 Where to find him

— MAWLANA ZAKARIYAH PHILANDER —

Author of The Story of the Qur’an: Recounting the First 13 Years of Revelation.

Khatib, Masjid, corner Victoria Road and 7th Avenue, Grassy Park.

Equilibrium Elementary — equilibriumelementary.com

— ISNAD ACADEMY —

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Hosted by Shaykh Irshaad Sedick.

#ROOTED #IsnadAcademy #IslamicScholarship #CapeTown #Isnad

Long before he was a professor, before the struggle, before the academy — Farid Esack was a boy in Bontheuwel raised by a single mother, and a child of the Tablighi Jamaat.

In this first sitting of a new series from Isnad Academy, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick sits with Professor Farid Esack — his own Master's supervisor — to trace a life: the Group Areas Act and a move from Wynberg, a mother who stood at the window until her last son came home, the Jamaat that saw value in people the world had written off, the years in the madrasa in Karachi, and what a classically trained student carries into the modern academy.

This is not a debate. It is a sitting about life and what it means to be a Muslim in South Africa.

We speak plainly in this conversation about the tension between the traditional madrasa and the Western academy — including Professor Esack's own striking words about it. Shaykh Irshaad and Professor Esack come from different worlds of learning and do not agree on everything. You do not have to agree with a man on everything to sit with him, to learn from his life, and to honour what he has carried.

⚠️ PART 2 is coming: the return to South Africa, his years in the Muslim Judicial Council, the Call of Islam and the UDF struggle years, and the open letter to the Palestinian people that today stands painted across the separation wall.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold open

0:29 Introduction

2:13 South African Muslim, or Muslim in South Africa?

7:59 Bontheuwel — and "that must be Upper Bontheuwel"

8:41 Weinberg, the Group Areas Act, and the move to Bontheuwel

13:16 A mother, six boys, and the window

15:48 The debt to women you can never repay

20:03 A child of the Tablighi Jamaat

25:59 "Join the Tabligh, see the Republic"

28:39 The adab of the Jamaat: a grain of rice, and shura

33:18 Returning to the markas where nobody knows him

36:14 How the Jamaat sent him to Pakistan

42:07 Entering the Darul Uloom in Karachi

47:34 The dandruff story, and how we judge people

52:34 What the madrasa years left him

57:02 Knowledge is sacred: paper, marginalia, and awe

1:00:31 "Are you schizophrenic, or a munafiq?"

1:01:30 The academy and the tradition: what each gets wrong

1:07:24 The problem with the maqasid turn

1:08:58 Senior scholars in Istanbul say the same

1:09:31 Closing, and what comes in Part 2

ABOUT THE GUEST

Professor Farid Esack is a South African scholar of Islam, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, and one of the most widely read Muslim academic voices from this country. Formed in the Tablighi Jamaat and trained in the dars-i-nizami in Karachi before completing his doctoral work abroad, he served the Muslim Judicial Council and later held national office in the democratic South Africa.

ABOUT THE HOST

Shaykh Irshaad Sedick is a Cape Town–based Islamic scholar in the Shafi'i school, a hadith specialist, and the founder of Isnad Academy. He teaches full-time with SeekersGuidance.

JOIN OUR SCHOOL COMMUNITY → [https://www.skool.com/isnad-academy-7659/about]

SUPPORT OUR WORK → [https://payf.st/sfr4x]

Isnad Academy connects the global Muslim community to authenticated Islamic scholarship — live teaching, recorded courses, and conversations like this one.

#FaridEsack #IslamInSouthAfrica #IsnadAcademy #CapeTown #TablighiJamaat #IslamicScholarship

In the 1960s, thirty-four men in the whole of Cape Town carried the Quran in their hearts, and Imam Fuad Samaai knew every one of them by name.

“The chain is made in the maktab, or it is not made at all.”

In 1973 he was one of eight students in the first intake of South Africa’s first Darul Uloom, in Newcastle. There, Mawlana Qasim Sema (Allah have mercy on him) gave him the instruction that set the course of his life: the chain of transmission (isnad) begins in the maktab, the children’s Quran school, so give your life to that. Fifty years later, two thousand children and dozens of teachers sit in his care.

In this episode of Rooted, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick asks him the question few have asked: Did it work? And does a chain of transmission still mean anything in a world where anyone with a phone can claim to know?

What follows is living memory, the huffaz of District Six and the respect they showed one another, Imaam Naeim Moerat (Allah have mercy on him) still teaching children at his bedside at ninety-four, the majlis of Shaykh Abdul Fattah Abu Ghudda (Allah have mercy on him), and the friendship of Mufti Taha Karaan (Allah have mercy on him), whose students he addresses directly at the close.

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Chapters:

0:00 The Attitude We Teach Our Children

0:38 Thirty-Four Huffaz — Meet Imam Fuad Samaai

2:47 Does the Chain Still Mean Anything?

3:14 Newcastle, and Mawlana Qasim Sema's Instruction

7:24 "Like a Washing Machine" — What a Darul Uloom Is For

11:27 The Huffaz of 1960s Cape Town

14:22 Hifz Then and Now — the Missing Link

21:09 When a Hafiz Walked into a Room

23:58 Imaam Naeim Moerat — Seventy Years of Teaching

31:07 Newcastle 1973 — the Treasure Lesson

35:02 The Mufti's Method — Fatwas and Memory

44:39 Four to Six Hours of Reading, Every Day

45:47 The Barakah of a Physical Kitab

49:56 The Maktab Mission, Fifty Years On

55:49 One Syllabus for Twelve Towns

59:23 Do We Value Islamic Education?

1:02:17 The Finance Trap and the Teacher's Sacrifice

1:11:51 The Names History Must Remember

1:24:45 In the Majlis of the Great Ulama

1:31:03 Mufti Taha Karaan and Advice to His Students

1:41:33 Become a Uniting Force — At Least Teach

Rooted is the interview series of Isnad Academy. Its premise is simple: authentic Islamic knowledge is carried by an unbroken chain, from teacher to student, back to the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace).

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Rooted podcast, Isnad Academy, Imam Fuad Samaai, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick, Cape Town huffaz, maktab education, madrasah, Darul Uloom Newcastle, Mawlana Qasim Sema, Mufti Taha Karaan, isnad, hifz, Quran memorisation, Islamic scholarship South Africa, Cape Town ulama