Hamza Yusuf

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson is a traditionalist Islamic scholar and teaches at the Zaytuna Institute in California. Yusuf was born as Mark Hanson in Walla Walla, Washington and was raised in Northern California in a Greek Orthodox family, the son of a US academic father and activist mother. At the age of 17, in 1977, Hanson became a Muslim in Santa Barbara, California, after having a near-death experience in a car accident which led him to read the Qur'an and eventually to convert to Islam.