Dr. Mazhar Kazi, Texas Muslim Pioneer and Father of Yasir Qadhi, Dies at 89

Dr. Mazhar Kazi, a biologist, educator, and one of the earliest architects of organized Muslim life in the American South — and father of the prominent Islamic scholar Dr. Yasir Qadhi — died on Nov. 10, 2025, in Houston. He was 89.

Born in 1936 in Jabalpur, in what was then British India, Dr. Kazi migrated with his family to Karachi shortly after the partition of 1947–48. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from the University of Karachi, where he became active in the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami and worked alongside early Islamic activists of postwar Pakistan.

In 1963 he arrived in Houston on a scholarship—the first Pakistani graduate student to pursue advanced studies there, by his recollection. He completed a Ph.D. in the biological sciences amid the overt racial segregation of the Jim Crow-era South, enduring discrimination that ranged from segregated buses and restaurants to academic obstruction that required formal appeals before his degree was granted.

Undeterred, Dr. Kazi began laying the institutional foundations that would transform Houston into one of the most vibrant Muslim cities in North America. In 1964 he established the Muslim Students Association chapter at the University of Houston, the first MSA in Texas. That same decade he co-founded the Islamic Society of Greater Houston (ISGH), raising small coins to purchase and convert an aging house into the city’s first mosque. From that modest beginning grew an organization that today owns and operates more than 45 masjids—one of the largest such networks on the continent.

After teaching in the United States, he moved his young family to Jeddah in 1979 to join the faculty of the newly established King Abdulaziz University, accepting a lower salary so his children could be raised in an Islamic environment. He eventually rose to assistant dean of the medical faculty despite holding a Ph.D. rather than an M.D.

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In 1991, at the peak of his academic career and aged 55, he resigned to return to Houston and devote himself full-time to da’wah. For the remaining 34 years of his life he held no salaried position. He printed and mailed thousands of free English Qur’ans, maintained a weekly Sunday class for seekers and new Muslims that ran uninterrupted for a quarter-century, and served as a volunteer chaplain in Texas state and federal prisons, guiding countless inmates to Islam through personal correspondence.

Dr. Kazi authored or compiled more than 25 widely distributed books in English during an era when accessible Islamic literature for Anglophone audiences was almost nonexistent. Works such as “Guidance to the Messenger” (1989) and “A Treasury of Hadith,” later translated into over a dozen languages, became essential reading for a generation of English-speaking Muslims.

He is survived by his wife, his elder son Obaid Kazi, a longtime community leader in Houston; his younger son, Yasir Qadhi, the noted Islamic scholar and public speaker; and six grandchildren.

At his janazah, converts he had personally mentored—many of whom first encountered Islam through an advertisement, a mailed Qur’an, or an invitation to Sunday dinner—traveled from across Texas to bid him farewell. Their presence testified to a lifetime spent in quiet, selfless service.

Dr. Mazhar Kazi belonged to the pioneering generation of postwar Muslim immigrants who, with little more than sincerity and determination, built the institutions that later generations now inherit. His legacy is measured not in fame but in the hundreds of thousands who pray in the masjids he helped establish and in the countless hearts he gently guided toward faith.

May Allah accept his efforts, forgive his shortcomings, expand his grave, and unite him with the righteous in the highest gardens. Ameen.