Muhammad Sadiq Muhammad Yusuf

Muhammad Sadiq Muhammad Yusuf was born on 15 April 1952 in the village of Niyozbotir in the Asaka district of Andijan region, into the family of the religious scholar Muhammad Yusuf. He received his first religious instruction from his father and then finished secondary school.

In 1970 he entered the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara and, thanks to what he had already learned, completed its seven-year course in three years. From 1973 to 1975 he studied at the Imam al-Bukhari Islamic Institute in Tashkent, graduating with distinction, and then joined “Muslims of the Soviet East”, the journal of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. In 1976 the Administration sent him to Libya, and in 1980 he graduated from the Islamic Call College in Tripoli at the top of his class.

From 1981 he taught Quranic exegesis, hadith, the Quranic sciences and creed at the Imam al-Bukhari Islamic Institute in Tashkent, becoming its vice-rector in 1982 and its rector in 1984. In the same years he also worked in the Administration’s foreign relations department.

On 6 February 1989 he was elected chairman of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan and mufti, and later that year he became a People’s Deputy of the USSR. During his tenure the Quran of Uthman was handed over from a museum to the Administration, mosques and madrasas were opened, religious literature began to be published, and in 1990 some five hundred Muslims from the Central Asian republics went on the hajj. After Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991 he became the first mufti of the independent republic; the first parts of his Quran commentary “Tafsiri Hilol” appeared in 1991–1993.

In 1993 he resigned as mufti and went abroad, working first with the Muslim World League in Mecca and then, from 1994 to 2001, living in Libya. In those years he completed “Tafsiri Hilol” and worked on the multi-volume series “Hadith and Life”.

In 2001 he returned to Uzbekistan and devoted the rest of his life to scholarship and religious education: he wrote and published books, made a translation of the meanings of the Quran into Uzbek, and his lectures and talks circulated as audio and video recordings. Under his direction the Uzbek-language Islamic website islom.uz was set up, where he answered more than 25,000 questions from readers. He was a co-founder of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and a member of the Constituent Council of the Muslim World League and of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan.

He died of a heart attack in Tashkent on 10 March 2015, at the age of 62. Tens of thousands of people attended the funeral prayer at the Sheikh Zaynuddin mosque, and he was buried in the Sheikh Zaynuddin cemetery in Kukcha. A congregational mosque in Tashkent’s Chilanzar district, opened in 2019, and a mosque in Shymkent bear his name; in 2023 he was posthumously awarded the Order of Imam al-Bukhari of the highest degree.