Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Wymann-Landgraf) is an American Muslim,
born in 1948
to a Protestant family in Columbus, Nebraska. He grew up in Athens,
Georgia,
where both parents taught at the University of Georgia.
Shortly after
coming to Cornell, Dr. Abd-Allah read The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, which
inspired him to embrace Islam in early 1970. In 1972, he altered his
field of
study and transferred to the University of Chicago, where he studied
Arabic and
Islamic Studies under Dr. Fazlur Rahman. Dr. Abd-Allah received his
doctorate
with honors in 1978 for a dissertation on the origins of Islamic
Law, Malik’s
Concept of ‘Amal in the Light of Maliki Legal Theory. From 1977
until
1982, he taught at the Universities of Windsor (Ontario), Temple,
and Michigan.
In 1982, he left America to teach Arabic in Spain. Two years later,
he was
appointed to the Department of Islamic Studies at King Abdul-Aziz
University in
Jeddah, where he taught (in Arabic) Islamic studies and comparative
religions
until 2000. During his years abroad, Dr. Abd-Allah had the
privilege of
studying with a number of traditional Islamic scholars.