Abdul-Basser, Taha Bin Hassan

(Principal and Co-Founder, Straightway Ethical Advisory LLC, New York, New York) Taha Abdul-Basser is the Muslim Chaplain at Harvard University and an independent consultant, researcher, and translator in the field of Islamic ethics and law. He currently acts as a shari‘a advisor for several national and global financial entities. He was a Lecturer in Arabic at Boston University and a staff researcher on Islamic financial ethics and law for the Harvard Islamic Finance Information Program. He received an A.B. in the Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard College in 1996, a Certificate in the Advanced Study of the Arabic Language from the Spectra Institute of Language Studies in San‘a, Yemen in 1995, a Masters in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2006 and is ABD in the same department. A student of traditional Islamic disciplines for more than 13 years, he has trained under several teachers (shuyukh), including Shaykh Nizam Yaqubi, from whom he has several traditional licenses (ijazat). He was lead researcher and contributor to the shari‘a Database, the Harvard Islamic Finance Project’s electronic database on Islamic financial ethics and jurisprudence which served as the seed database for Euromoney's Islamic Finance Information Service.