Harun Verstaen

Jeroen Harun Verstaen holds a master’s degree in law and works as a paralegal. In his spare time, he is an independent researcher, freelance translator (English-Dutch), and proofreader. In 2004, three years after writing his master’s thesis on the application of the sharīʿah in Sudan, he became Muslim at the age of 28. Since then, he has been studying Islam and the Arabic language, both at an academic level and in a traditional way, at several Islamic institutes and with teachers at home and abroad. To this end, he traveled to the UK, Belgium, Germany, Morocco, Egypt, and Kenya, for short periods. He obtained a number of ijāzāt (certificates) from scholars such as Shaykh Mohammed Daniel of Cordoba Academy, as well as diplomas in this regard, such as the ‘Diploma Introduction to Classical Islamic Texts’ from the well-known Cambridge Islamic College of Shaykh Muḥammad Akram Nadwī. For Cordoba Academy and at a local mosque, he has taught a course on the ten principles of the Islamic sciences a few times. He has since translated a range of Islamic books and texts into Dutch, published by various national and international publishers, including the well-known work Our Master Muhammad by ʿAbdallah Sirājuddīn al-Ḥusaynī and The Encompassing Epistle by Aḥmad b. Zayn al-Ḥabashī. He wrote forewords to four books of the Kenyan imam and internationally known author Yahya Ondigo. He also compiled an introductory work in Dutch about the ten principles for the Islamic sciences of fiqh, ʿaqīdah, and taṣawwuf, which was published in 2020. In 2022 he published his first work in English, called “Principles of Islamic Studies”.