Shabir Ally

Shabir Ally was born in Guyana into an Indo-Guyanese family of Gujarati descent and moved to Canada with his family in 1978. He holds a degree in religious studies from Laurentian University, with a focus on biblical literature, and a science degree with a physics major. He completed a master’s degree and a doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of Toronto; his doctoral thesis, finished in 2013, concerned the history of Qur’anic exegesis.

He is president of the Islamic Information and Dawah Centre International in Toronto and is best known for public lectures, television programmes and debates with Christian apologists. His publications are short English works for general readers, mostly on Christian-Muslim questions, including Is Jesus God? The Bible Says No!, 101 Clear Contradictions in the Bible and a co-authored volume of debate with the Christian author James R. White.

He favours a contextual reading of the Qur’an and has taken positions that differ from mainstream traditional scholars on questions such as hadith authentication, consensus, head covering and evolution, which has drawn both support and criticism.