Sheikh Faraz Rabbani
Sheikh Faraz Rabbani, based in Toronto, Canada, is the founder and executive director of SeekersGuidance, a global online Islamic education platform that has taught students worldwide since the early 2000s. He is not on any US halal home financing provider's Shariah board, but his platform has directly and repeatedly addressed the underlying question those providers exist to answer: whether and when a mortgage is permissible.
Background
Sheikh Rabbani earned a bachelor's degree in Economics and Commerce from the University of Toronto in 1997, then spent roughly a decade studying and teaching the Islamic sciences in Damascus, Amman, and Karachi under scholars including Shaykh Nuh Keller and Mufti Mahmud Ashraf Usmani. He co-founded SunniPath before it became SeekersGuidance — a platform built specifically to make classical Sunni scholarship accessible online, offering free courses and a public Q&A service to a large global audience. He has been named among the world's 500 most influential Muslims by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre every year since 2011.
Role in Islamic finance
Rather than sitting on a provider's board, Sheikh Rabbani's relevance to US halal home financing runs through SeekersGuidance's public answers archive, where he has personally checked and approved guidance on whether it is permissible to purchase a home with a mortgage and on mortgages in cases of genuine need. That kind of individual-scholar ruling is the first of the three approval models described in our fatwas and financing models guide — distinct from, but informative alongside, the standing provider boards that companies like Guidance Residential and UIF Corporation retain.