Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Wymann-Landgraf) is an American Muslim, born in 1948 to a Protestant family of the Midwest. Early in 1970, he embraced Islam in Ithaca, New York while studying English literature at Cornell University as a Woodrow Wilson honorary fellow. He then changed his field of study and transferred to the University of Chicago in 1972, where he received his doctorate, with honors, in 1978 for a dissertation pertaining to the origins of Islamic Law. He taught at the Universities of Windsor (Ontario), Temple, and Michigan from 1977 until 1982, when he left the United States to teach Arabic in Granada (Spain).

In 1984, he was appointed to the Department of Islamic Studies at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and taught Islamic studies and comparative religions there until 2000. During his years abroad, Dr. Abd-Allah took advantage of the opportunity to study numerous classical Islamic disciplines under several traditional Islamic teachers. He is fluent in English and Arabic and acquainted with several modern and ancient tongues.

Dr. Abd-Allah returned to Chicago in August of 2000 to work with the then newly founded Nawawi Foundation as its Chairman and Scholar-in-Residence. Accordingly, he now teaches throughout Chicago land and conducts research in Islamic studies and cognate fields. Dr. Abd-Allah resides with his family in the western suburbs of Chicago.