Shaykh Yahya Rhodus

Shaykh Yahya Rhodus was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He embraced Islam at the age of 19 in Santa Clara, California, where he began his study of Islam with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and visiting Mauritanian scholars. In 1998, Shaykh Yahya traveled to Mauritania to pursue a full-time course of study, where he learned from some of Mauritania’s greatest scholars, including the distinguished, Murabit al-Hajj. He also spent an interim period in Damascus, Syria where he received formal education in the Arabic language, grammar, and Qur’anic recitation. In 2000, Shaykh Yahya moved to Tarim, Yemen to continue his studies at the prestigious learning institute, Dar al-Mustafa. There, he spent his formative years studying foundational Islamic sciences with Habib ‘Umar bin Hafiz, Habib ‘Ali al-Jifri, and other scholars of Tarim. The scholars of Tarim are heirs of the spiritual way of Imam al-Ghazali as taught by the great sage of

Arabia, Imam Abdullah ibn ‘Alawi al-Haddad. At the hands of these scholars, Shaykh Yahya has studied and applied the book that he teaches in this course.