Maulana Mohammed Akram Nadvi was born in 1963 in Jaunpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He was a student at the Nadwatul Ulema’s Darul Uloom in Lucknow in the 1980s, completing its four-year alimiyyah course and then the two year fadilah or master’s level course. His specialisation was in hadith studies. He then pursued further studies at Lucknow University, obtaining a BA in Economics and a PhD in Arabic Literature. Maulana Akram returned to teach at the Nadwa, proceeding in 1989 to take up a research fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
In 2006, Maulana Akram co-founded (with his daughter, Sumaiya Akram) the Al-Salam Institute (ASI) in Oxford for providing both men and women access to structured classes in traditional Islamic studies. In 2013, he established the Cambridge Islamic college His major oeuvre is a multi-volume work on female hadith scholars, Al-Muhaddithat, published in 2019. He published Foundation to Hadith Science: A Primer on Understanding & Studying Hadith in 2021.
His books in Urdu include travelogues based on journeys in Palestine, Hejaz and Andulusia; Gaon ka larka (Village boy); Zikr-e Nadwa (translated to English as Lessons Learned: Treasures from Nadwah’s Sages).