Isnad Academy Podcast

Every hafiz in this country recited to a teacher who recited to a teacher, all the way back to Rasulullah ﷺ. Mawlana Qari Saleem Gaibie has given his life to guarding that chain and to mapping it. He memorised the Quran at Darul Uloom Zakariyya, then sat for years with Qari Ayyub Ishaq through the seven and the ten qira'at. He holds ijazat from teachers in South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan...

Her daughter was seven and ten juz into her hifz when Dr Hajir Bawa asked her to pause. Radia broke down: "Mommy, please, I don't want to stop. I want to be like our Nabi." Dr Hajir Bawa was born in District Six, married at sixteen, and worked as a textile designer before the Quran took over her life. She co-founded the Jameyyatul Qurra Girls Hifth School at IPSA with the late Shaykh Y...

The Prophet, Allah bless him and give him peace, said that the strong believer is better and more beloved to Allah than the weak believer, and in both there is good. In the first episode of BRANCHES, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick sits with Ustadh Nisar Shaikh, a grappling coach from London with more than twenty years on the mat, to ask what that strength is. They talk about the ego and being pinned by som...

Shaykh Nazeer Majiet only began his hifz after matric, on his father's one condition. From Shaykh Yusuf Agherdien's hifz school in Chiappini Street he went on to Darun Na'im, al-Tanzil and the Darul Uloom in Strand, then to Cairo, where he graduated from al-Azhar and sat with the mashayikh of the madyafas, among them Dr Ahmad al-Tijani. Today he heads the Arabic and Tafsir departments...

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...

"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 e...

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...

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...

"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 help...

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 Afr...

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 1...

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 fir...

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 stoo...

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 t...

He had top marks, a UCT mathematics degree, and lucrative bursary offers on the table — a clear road to actuarial science and comfortable money. He walked away from all of it, into the Darul Uloom of Mufti Taha Karaan (Allah have mercy on him), and says he would make that decision "every single day of my life again." In this episode of ROOTED, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick sits down with his forme...

When Tony embraced Islam, he lost his business, his friends, and, for a time, his family. In Part 2 of his conversation on ROOTED, Shaykh Riyad Walls tells the story of what came next: the journey into sacred knowledge. From his wife teaching him alif-bā, to selling his beloved hi-fi to pay the rent, to walking a Long Street that was once lined with bookshops, to the hadith that lit the fire in hi...

Three generations after his great-grandfather arrived in the Cape as a color-sergeant in a British punitive expedition, Shaykh Riyad Walls walked into a home in Cape Town and took his shahada. In this episode of ROOTED, he tells the story of how he came to Islam, the Rastafarian who handed him a book on the life of the Prophet ﷺ, the warmth of the Muslims of Heideveld, the men in white on the step...

Two men from the Cape who once stood against apartheid boarded a boat for Gaza. They were seized in international waters, held in an Israeli prison, and sent home. This is their witness. Former Ambassador Faizel Moosa and Mogamed Faeek Ariefdien sailed with the Global Sumud Flotilla on its Spring 2026 mission. In this Strong Believer special they sit with Shaykh Irshaad Sedick and tell the story t...

In a time when anyone can upload an Islamic video and call themselves a scholar, Islam has always been carried differently — from teacher to student, across generations, all the way back to the Prophet ﷺ. That chain has a name: isnād. ROOTED is Isnad Academy's flagship interview series. Conversations with South Africa's qualified Islamic scholars — the people who went to the source and cam...

A practical, no-fiqh conversation about Qurbani with Mawlana Anees Kara of Maraisburg, Johannesburg. After nearly four decades in this work, Mawlana Anees brings the kind of practitioner knowledge that does not appear in any classical text or fatwa site: how to pick a healthy animal off the kraal, why some Qurbani meat tastes different and how to prevent it, the real difference between farm and ho...

In a generation pulled in every direction, ROOTED is a series about the ones who stayed grounded. The scholars who sat at the feet of their teachers and carried the tradition home. Sh Muhammad West is one of the few in his generation who carries two worlds at once. A graduate of the Islamic University of Madina and a chartered accountant. The imam of one of the oldest masajid in the country, Boorh...

We live in a time when anyone can upload an Islamic video and call themselves a scholar. But Islam has never been carried that way. It has always moved from teacher to student, across generations, all the way back to the Prophet ﷺ. That chain has a name: isnād. ROOTED is Isnad Academy's flagship interview series — conversations with South Africa's qualified Islamic scholars. The people who...

The Muslim world is not confused. It is paralysed. And there is a difference. In this opening episode of Season 2, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick begins with a question asked outside a masjid after Isha: what am I supposed to do now? It is the question every Muslim is carrying. And the answer begins with a prophetic diagnosis that is 1,400 years old and more relevant today than it has ever been. We live in...

In this post Ramadan reminder, Shaykh Irshaad Sedick reflects on one of the most important questions facing every believer after Eid: what happens after Ramadan? Drawing on the verses of Surah Fussilat, the glad tidings given to those who say “Our Lord is Allah” and then remain steadfast, this talk explores the meaning of istiqamah, not as perfection, but as constantly getting back up and returnin...

In this episode, I sit with Mln. Ebrahim Moosa from the Palestine Information Network for a frank conversation on the current escalation in the region and what it means for the wider Ummah. This is the full, raw recording as it was captured. It is not edited for tone, platform sensitivities, or soundbites. The aim is clarity: identifying the aggressor-victim framing, resisting oversimplification,...