Forty seven of the 500 names in the 2027 edition of The Muslim 500 are listed under the United States. That is more than any other country on earth, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Pakistan, more than Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. Nearly one in ten of the most influential Muslims on the planet, by this book count, is American. Two of them represent Dearborn in Congress and the Senate. A third is the new Mayor of New York City.
The top of the list tells a different story, and it is the story the editors want you to read first. For seventeen years, The Muslim 500 has opened with a single name at the top. The 2027 edition breaks that habit. Five leaders share the number one spot, three countries share one defence pact, and the book reads less like a ranking than like a record of a year in which the Muslim world was remade by war.
The five are King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir of Pakistan, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Türkiye. The book puts them at joint number one for the first time ever, and it gives a single reason: the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7, 2026, and activated during an emergency summit in Riyadh. The pact joins Saudi money, Turkish weapons technology, and Pakistani military strength into one mutual defence alliance, built, in the book words, on a “one for all, all for one” approach to security. The editors call the edition a historic turning point, and on this point the evidence in their own pages supports them: a year ago, Sharif and Munir were not ranked at all, they sat in the unranked 450 lists. King Salman was eighth. The Crown Prince was fourteenth. Erdogan was seventh. Now all five sit together at the top.
That is the headline. The rest of the book is the story of how they got there, and it is a darker story than the headline suggests.
The top of the list
Below the joint number one, the Top 50 reads like a map of the year just passed. At number four sits a new name, Ayatollah Sayyid Mojtaba Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. He took office on March 8, 2026, after the book records a joint American and Israeli assassination of his father, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026, in a strike that the book says also killed Mojtaba Khamenei wife and teenage son. The Assembly of Experts elected him eight days later. His father, who had ruled Iran since 1989, appears in the book obituaries. The succession is the single largest change in the ranking, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: this is an edition shaped by a war on Iran.
At number five is King Abdullah II of Jordan, unchanged from last year. At number six is the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, down from number one in 2026, the steepest fall at the top of the list. The scholar who held number two last year, Mufti Muhammad Taqi Usmani of Pakistan, falls to number seven. The Yemeni scholar Umar bin Hafiz falls from three to eight. The Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Muhammad Al-Tayyeb of Egypt, falls from six to nine. The risers tell their own story: Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah of Mauritania climbs from eighteen to ten, and the Houthi leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi of Yemen climbs from twenty one to seventeen.
The rest of the top twenty mixes kings, presidents, and scholars in the proportions the book has always favored. The President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, is twelfth. The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, is thirteenth, down from tenth. The King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, is fourteenth. The Indonesian President, Prabowo Subianto, is sixteenth. The Indian scholar Mahmood Madani is eighteenth. The Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’adu Abubakar III of Nigeria, is nineteenth. The head of Turkish intelligence, Ibrahim Kalin, is twentieth.
Further down, the list makes room for the new and the unexpected. The Uzbek President, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, enters the Top 50 at forty, promoted from the unranked lists. The Taliban leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, holds forty three, exactly where he sat last year. The interim President of Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, is forty six. And at forty nine sits the most surprising American name on the list: Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, sworn in on January 1, 2026, at the age of thirty five, promoted from the unranked lists. At fifty, closing the ranking, sits the book’s Man of the Year.
The stability lower down is itself a finding. From twenty two to forty five, most names barely move: El-Sisi, Ali Gomaa, Al-Jifri, Hamza Yusuf, and the Tijaniyya leader Ahmad Tijani Cisse hold the same ranks as last year. The book’s own introduction says the list changes gradually rather than dramatically year on year, and outside the top ten that is what happened.
Two people of the year
The book names two Persons of the Year, and neither holds power. That is the point.
The Man of the Year is Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, a paediatrician and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. On December 27, 2024, he walked out of a burning hospital toward two Israeli armoured vehicles, and the photograph became one of the defining images of the war. He has not been free since. The book records that he has spent more than six hundred days in Israeli custody without charge or trial, held under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law on the basis of evidence the authorities treat as confidential. His son Ibrahim was killed by an Israeli drone at the hospital gate in late October 2024. He was wounded by shrapnel the following month. In April 2026 a district court extended his detention, and in June 2026 the Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Since June 3, 2026, the book says, he has been held in solitary confinement, beyond the fifteen consecutive days Amnesty International says is permitted, in Nafha desert prison, barred from meeting his lawyer for more than fifty days. Israel maintains the hospital was used as a Hamas stronghold and that Abu Safiya held a rank in the organisation, an allegation his family, his colleagues at the charity MedGlobal, and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights reject. The book names him at number fifty in the Top 50 as well, a new entry, and it honours him as a man with no army, no office, and no freedom who did more than most governments to remind the world what courage and integrity look like.
The Woman of the Year is Fatemeh Zahra Sheikhabadi, a schoolgirl from Minab, in southern Iran. On the morning of February 28, 2026, she walked to Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School expecting an ordinary day. The school was struck by missiles twice, and her friends and teachers were killed around her. The book says the missiles were fired by the United States, as part of the war it launched against Iran alongside Israel that same day. A United Nations fact finding mission later found reasonable grounds to believe American forces were responsible, and concluded the attack was indiscriminate and therefore a war crime, finding no evidence the school was used for any military purpose. The book names the dead: seven year old Makan Nasiri, whose grave holds no remains beyond a sweater and a shoe; his teacher Mandana Salari, killed alongside her own daughter; the second grade teacher Nasim Neyestani, who had sent fourteen of her pupils home with their parents before the missile struck her classroom; a boy named Muhammad Taha, who should have turned ten that evening; and a boy named Hami, whose grandfather still sits on a bench by the ruined school most evenings. On June 18, 2026, Fatemeh Zahra travelled to Geneva and addressed the UN Human Rights Council in person. Her statement was met with thirty seconds of silence in the chamber. She is not in the Top 50 or in the 450 lists. The book honours her precisely because she holds no power over anyone, only a memory she did not choose and the courage to put it into words.
Last year the book honoured the people of Gaza collectively as its Persons of the Year. This year it names two individuals, one from Gaza and one from Iran, and in doing so it ties the two wars of 2026 together in a single frame.
The year the book records
The Muslim 500 is not only a list. It is also a review of the year, with a survey of the Muslim world, a timeline of major events, and a special feature that updates the book two previous features on Gaza and the West Bank. Read together, those sections give the clearest picture anywhere in one volume of what 2026 did to the Muslim world, as the editors in Amman saw it.
The Gaza feature carries the heaviest figures in the book. It reports 73,821 Palestinians confirmed killed since October 7, 2023, including 21,500 children, and about 174,800 injured, figures it attributes to the Gaza Ministry of Health as of September 17, 2026. It reports 1,386 people killed after the ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025. It puts the reconstruction cost at 71.4 billion dollars, with 107,941 housing units destroyed or uninhabitable against only 627 repaired in 2026. A mortality study from February 2026, cited in the feature, estimated 75,200 violent deaths plus 8,540 excess non violent deaths by January 5, 2025 alone, and found that 56.2 percent of the violent deaths were women, children, and the elderly. The feature also reports the West Bank toll: 1,145 Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, including more than 250 children; more than 1,380 settler attacks between January and July 2026, about 6.6 a day; 54 new settlements approved in 2025, a record; 63,311 settlement housing units advanced in 2025. It quotes Israeli ministers stating the endpoint openly, including a plan for 250,000 departures from Gaza in its first year and 1.86 million within seven years, and a proposal to annex 82 percent of the West Bank. Its conclusion is blunt: Gaza and the West Bank are one demographic project pursued at two speeds in two places. It cites the UN Commission of Inquiry finding of genocidal intent in September 2025, B’Tselem, and the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of July 2024.
The survey of the year also records the February 28, 2026 war on Iran, the assassination of Ali Khamenei, and the succession of his son. The book obituaries list nine people who died since the last edition, and the first name on that list is the Supreme Leader himself, dead at eighty six. The others include the Malaysian philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, the Najaf marja Mohammad Ishaq Al-Fayadh, the Saudi Salafi scholar Rabee al-Madkhali, the Grand Mufti of Ethiopia Hajji Omar Idris, the Nigerian Tijaniyya leader Dahiru Usman Bauchi, the Egyptian geologist Zaghloul El-Naggar, the Bosnian wartime deputy prime minister Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, and the Georgetown professor John Louis Esposito, of whom the book notes that he reportedly took the Shahadah on his deathbed.
The guest essays in this edition run to nine pieces, and two of them take up the Makkah pact directly. One, by the book’s own researcher Lamya Al-Khraisha, calls it a new architecture of Muslim power. Another, by Phar Kim Beng and Luthfy Hamzah, asks why Southeast Asia must pay attention. The essays warn against easy labels: one cautions against calling the pact an Islamic NATO, a description it treats as premature and analytically misleading. That caution is worth keeping in mind. A mutual defence pact among three states is not a military alliance of the Muslim world, and the book’s own pages show how far the Muslim world is from acting as one.
Where influence sits
The book index by country is the most revealing section for anyone who wants to know where influence sits, and it does not flatter the obvious assumptions.
The United States holds 47 entries, more than any other country. The United Kingdom holds 35. Together the two Western diaspora states hold 82 names, more than any Muslim majority country except Saudi Arabia, which holds 30. Pakistan holds 28, Indonesia 27, Egypt 24, India 23, Iran 21, and Palestine 21. Nigeria and Türkiye hold 16 each. Malaysia holds 14. Iraq, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates hold 12 each. Eighty one countries appear in the index at all.
By region, the book’s own ordering gives the Middle East and North Africa 198 entries, Asia 131, Europe 62, North America 57, Sub-Saharan Africa 53, Oceania 6, and South America 5. The Middle East still dominates, but only just: more than six in ten entries sit outside it.
The distribution also exposes the gap between population and presence. Bangladesh is the fourth largest Muslim country in the world, with about 161.9 million Muslims, and it holds three entries. Nigeria, with about 135.9 million Muslims, holds sixteen. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country at about 250.4 million, holds twenty seven, barely ahead of Pakistan 250.3 million with twenty eight. Twenty seven countries hold exactly one entry each. And whole countries with large Muslim populations do not appear at all: Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Comoros, Djibouti, Guinea, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, and Gambia are absent from the index when it is set against the book’s own population appendix. Central Asia is nearly invisible, apart from the Uzbek president at number forty. The map of influence, in other words, is not a map of Muslims. It is a map of states, institutions, and media reach, and the states that fund institutions and command cameras do best.
The Top 50 sharpens the point. Six of its names come from Pakistan and six from Egypt. Four come from Saudi Arabia. Three each come from Yemen, the United States, Indonesia, Palestine, and Syria. Two each come from Türkiye, Iraq, and Nigeria. Fourteen countries hold a single name each, including Iran, Jordan, Qatar, the Emirates, Malaysia, Morocco, India, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Mauritania. No country in Europe appears in the Top 50 except through its diaspora scholars, and no country in Sub-Saharan Africa appears except Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania. The summit of the list belongs to the old centers of power: Riyadh, Cairo, Islamabad, Ankara, and Amman.
Who is on the list, and who is not
The book does not sort people by ethnicity. It sorts them by country and by field, and any reading of its ethnic makeup has to be built from those two sortings. Labelled as a reading, the picture is clear enough.
Arabs dominate the top of the list. Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Mauritanians fill most of the Top 50, and the Gulf monarchies and the religious institutions of Cairo and Amman set the tone. South Asians form the largest bloc in the full 500 by weight of numbers, led by Pakistan 28 and India 23, but they hold only a small share of the very top: one Pakistani scholar in the top ten, and no Indian or Bangladeshi name in the Top 50 at all until Mahmood Madani of India at eighteen. Southeast Asians, Indonesians and Malaysians together, hold 41 index entries and three Top 50 names, a strong showing for a region the Middle East often treats as peripheral. Sub-Saharan Africans hold 53 index entries but only four Top 50 names, all of them men, and none in the top ten. The Western diaspora is the mirror image: Americans and Britons hold 82 index entries, and three Americans sit in the Top 50, but almost all of the diaspora names sit in scholarship, media, arts, and sports, not in politics or religious administration.
The communal picture is narrower still. Six of the 52 people in the Top 50 are Shia: Mojtaba Khamenei at four, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq at eleven, the Houthi leader Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi at seventeen, the philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr at thirty three, Muqtada al-Sadr of Iraq at thirty six, and Zohran Mamdani of New York at forty nine. That is roughly in line with the Shia share of the world Muslim population, which runs around one in ten to one in seven. The most prominent Shia alive, by the book’s own ranking, is Sistani, the preeminent marja of Najaf. The Ismaili community is represented by its Imam, Prince Rahim Aga Khan V, in the administration of religious affairs list. No Ibadi figure was identified in the Top 50. The book parent project, the Amman Message, formally recognises eight schools of Sunni, Shia, and Ibadi Islam, but the list itself remains a mostly Sunni document, and its institutional home in Amman promotes a traditional, orthodox, moderate Islam defined by that same consensus. That is not an accusation. It is a description of a standpoint, and a reader should know where the list stands before treating it as neutral ground.
The gender picture is the starkest. One woman sits in the Top 50: Samia Suluhu Hassan, President of Tanzania, at thirty five, the highest ranked woman in the book. Across the full 500, the count is about 112 women, roughly 22 percent. Inside the 450 lists, 111 women appear, and they cluster where the book expects women to be found: 29 in social issues, 20 in arts and culture, 13 in politics, 12 in business, 10 in science and technology. Only two appear in the scholarly list and two among preachers. None appears in the administration of religious affairs list, and none among the extremists. The Woman of the Year is not in the Top 50 at all. She is a schoolgirl. The contrast between the two facts is the story: the book honours a girl who survived a missile strike, and it ranks almost no women among the powerful.
The categories themselves tell a story about what the editors count as influence. Arts and culture is the largest category, with 64 names, followed by social issues with 53, scholarly with 50, political with 48, administration of religious affairs with 46, and preachers and spiritual guides with 42. Business holds 30, science and technology 33, media 24, influencers and sports 25, philanthropy 19, Quran reciters 14, and extremists just 2. The extremists category is worth pausing on. The book definition of influence explicitly includes impact that can be negative, and selection does not mean endorsement, so the mentor of Zarqawi and the emir of Al-Shabaab sit in the same volume as Nobel laureates, a Pulitzer winner, and the director general of UNESCO. That is a defensible choice for a book that claims to measure influence rather than virtue. It is also a reminder that a ranking of influence is not a ranking of goodness, and no reader should mistake it for one.
How the list is made
The book is candid about its method, and the candour is to its credit. The introduction defines influence as the power, cultural, ideological, financial, political, or otherwise, to make a change that will have a significant impact on the Muslim world or on Muslims. It states plainly that the impact can be either positive or negative, and that selection in no way means endorsement of a person’s views.
Influence is measured, the editors write, by a combination of social metrics, public opinion, and expert opinion. The public opinion leg is a month long open call for nominations every year, and all suggestions are considered. The editors give more weight to the achievements of a lifetime than to the achievements of a single year, and they give weight to trailblazers and to local influence as well as global influence, which is why the list changes gradually rather than dramatically year on year. The Top 50 are ranked. The remaining 450 are not ranked, only grouped into thirteen categories, and inside each category they are ordered by region, then alphabetically by country, then by surname.
What the book does not describe is any committee, vote, or scoring system. No selection committee beyond the editor, the editorial board, and the researchers is named. No formal process for deciding the rankings is set out. The rankings are, in the end, the editors’ judgment, informed by metrics, nominations, and expert opinion. That is not a scandal. It is how most such lists are made. But it means the Top 50, including the historic decision to name a joint number one, is an editorial act, not a measurement. The joint number one honours a pact the editors plainly admire. A reader who wants to know why five leaders share the top spot will find the answer in the book’s own pages: because the editors decided the pact mattered that much. The list is most useful when it is read that way, as a judgment by a particular institution with a particular standpoint, not as a census of power.
The book also serves as a reference work in its own right. Its appendices give the world Muslim population as 2,212,633,745, or 26.66 percent of the covered world population, with Indonesia just ahead of Pakistan as the largest Muslim country, by about 19,000 people. Its social media appendix lists the most followed Muslims online: Khaby Lame at 258 million followers, Salman Khan at 171 million, and Mohamed Salah at 103 million. Its timeline of major events and its obituaries make it a record of the year as much as a ranking. The editors describe its purpose in their own words:
A prospective guide to the new year, much like a Who’s Who.
Who is behind the book
The publisher is the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, known as RISSC, based at 20 Sa’ed Bino Road in Dabuq, Amman, Jordan. The editor is Dr Tarek Elgawhary, the managing editor is Aftab Ahmed, and the editorial board is Elgawhary with Lamya Al-Khraisha and Zeinab Asfour. The researchers are Al-Khraisha, Moustafa Elqabbany, Asfour, Simon, known as Sulayman, Hart, and Sarah Moore. The book is the eighteenth annual issue, and it is printed in Jordan.
RISSC was established in 2007 as a semi autonomous affiliate of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, an international Islamic institute founded in 1980 by the late King Hussein of Jordan. The institute is chaired by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, the King cousin and his chief adviser for religious and cultural affairs, and Prince Ghazi co authors one of the guest essays in this edition. The institute was the leading sponsor of the Amman Message of 2004, which sought a consensus definition of who is a Muslim and which schools of thought count as Islam, and of A Common Word, the 2007 open letter from Muslim scholars to Christian leaders. The Muslim 500 is published in cooperation with the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington.
The book itself carries no funding statement, no sponsor list, and no acknowledgements page that names a funder. The deposit data in the book names the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute as the preparing body. Beyond the publisher and its parent institute, no funder should be claimed. What can be said is that the project sits inside a Jordanian royal institution, chaired by a prince of the Hashemite family, and that its standpoint is the one the institute has promoted for twenty years: traditional, orthodox, moderate Islam, interfaith dialogue, and the unity of the schools of thought recognised by the Amman Message. The book states that the views expressed in it do not necessarily reflect those of RISSC or its advisory board. That disclaimer is standard. The institutional home is not.
That home also explains the book blind spots. A project of the Jordanian royal establishment will rank kings highly, will treat the Amman Message consensus as common ground, and will write about the region from Amman vantage point. A reader in Dearborn, or in Karachi, or in Lagos, will find much of value in it, and will also find places where the view from Amman is not their view. That is true of every such list. The honest response is to read it as what it is: a serious, well researched, institutionally situated judgment, not a view from nowhere.
What to make of it
Three judgments follow from the book’s own pages.
First, the joint number one is a political statement, and it should be read as one. The Makkah pact is real, and the book documents it carefully, but the decision to lift five leaders above every other Muslim on earth, including the scholars and the heads of older states, is the editors’ choice. It rewards a security bargain among three governments. It says nothing about whether the pact will hold, whether its members will honour it, or whether the publics of those three countries want it. The book’s own guest essays warn against inflating the pact into something it is not. A reader should take the warning seriously.
Second, the book is at its best when it honours the powerless. The two Persons of the Year carry the edition. A doctor who refused to abandon his patients and a schoolgirl who survived a missile strike and spoke to the world are more memorable than any ranking, and the book knows it. The decision to put Abu Safiya at number fifty as well, and to leave Sheikhabadi out of the ranked lists entirely, is a quiet admission that the ranking cannot contain what the book most wants to honour.
Third, the list is a mirror with a frame. It shows where power sits, and it shows who the editors think matters. It also shows who is missing: women, Central Asians, Bangladeshis, Africans outside a handful of states, and the ordinary Muslims whose influence is local, uncounted, and unranked. A list of five hundred names drawn from 2.2 billion people will always leave nearly everyone out. The question is whether the exclusions follow a pattern, and here they do. The pattern is the book’s own standpoint, and naming it is not an attack on the book. It is the beginning of reading it well.
Why this matters in Dearborn
Dearborn appears in this book through its own sons and daughters, and through the country that holds more entries than any other.
The most important is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed. The book records that he made history on November 3, 2026, by winning Michigan United States Senate election, becoming the first Muslim American ever elected to the United States Senate. It notes that he is a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate in public health from Oxford and a medical degree from Columbia, and that he was the public health director for the City of Detroit before entering politics. It records, in its own words, the bad faith Islamophobic attacks he faced, including highly publicised rhetoric from President Donald Trump, and his answer to them: a refusal to be drawn away from healthcare equity, environmental justice, and political reform. He sits in the book Honourable Mentions and in its political list, a new entry in both. Dearborn readers followed that campaign street by street, and the book confirmation of its result belongs in the record.
Rashida Tlaib sits in the same political list. The book records that she serves as the United States Representative for Michigan 12th Congressional District, a position she has held since 2019, that she was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrant parents, and that she made history as the first Muslim woman elected to the Michigan State Legislature. Her advocacy on Palestinian human rights, workers rights, and environmental justice is noted in the same entry. Her district includes Dearborn, and her presence on the list is Dearborn presence.
The American story in the book runs wider than Michigan. Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York City, sits at forty nine in the Top 50. Hamza Yusuf, the co founder of Zaytuna College, sits at twenty five. The philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr sits at thirty three. The political list holds André Carson and Keith Ellison, the first two Muslims elected to Congress. The preachers list holds Omar Suleiman, Zaid Shakir, and Yasir Qadhi. The media list holds Mehdi Hasan, Bassem Youssef, Fareed Zakaria, and Ayman Mohyeldin. The arts list holds Dave Chappelle and Ramy Youssef. The science list holds Amjad Masad, the founder of Replit, and Taher Elgamal, known as the father of SSL. The social issues list holds Linda Sarsour and Dalia Mogahed. Forty seven Americans in all, more than any other country, and the book’s own survey records El-Sayed win as one of the major events of the year.
There is a second Dearborn connection, and it is the heavier one. The book Gaza feature and its Iran sections describe wars that Dearborn families live with daily, through relatives in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq, and through the doctors, the teachers, and the children named in its pages. The book names the dead of a schoolyard in Minab and the doctors of a hospital in Beit Lahiya, and it gives them the dignity of names, ages, and stories. Dearborn has spent the last three years mourning those same names in its mosques, its schools, and its living rooms. A list that honours a Gazan doctor and an Iranian schoolgirl as its Persons of the Year is speaking, whether it intends to or not, to this city.
The Muslim 500 is not a perfect book. It is a royal institution ranking, a judgment call dressed as a measurement, and a view from Amman. But it is also the most complete annual record of who holds influence among the world 2.2 billion Muslims, and its 2027 edition captures a year in which that influence shifted under the pressure of war. Read it for the ranking, and read it for the record. The ranking will change again next year. The record of what happened to the people in it will not.
Sources and References
- The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims, 2027, The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Amman, Jordan, 363 pages, ISBN print 978-9957-635-87-9, https://themuslim500.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/2027-TheMuslim500-lowRes.pdf
- The Muslim 500, Top 50, 2027, https://themuslim500.com/2027-edition/top-50-2027/
- Malay Mail, Bernama, “PM Anwar lands 13th spot in world’s 500 most influential Muslims list for 2027”, November 13, 2026, https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2026/11/13/pm-anwar-lands-13th-spot-in-worlds-500-most-influential-muslims-list-for-2027/243043
- Views Bangladesh, “RISSC ranks CA Yunus 50th most influential Muslim in global listing”, November 2025, on the 2026 edition Top 50, https://viewsbangladesh.com/rissc-ranks-ca-yunus-50th-most-influential-muslim-in-global-listing/
- Deccan Live, “The Muslim 500: Top 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World, 2026 List Released by Royal Islamic Centre”, October 31, 2025, https://www.deccanlive.com/2025/10/31/the-muslim-500-top-500-most-influential-muslims-in-the-world-2026-list-released-by-royal-islamic-centre/
- Good News Pakistan, “28 Pakistanis in The Muslim 500 2026: Mufti Taqi Usmani Ranked No. 2 in the World”, 2026, https://goodnews.com.pk/pakistanis-in-the-muslim-500-2026/
- Business Today Malaysia, “Anwar Enters Global Top 10 Of Most Influential Muslims”, October 30, 2025, on the 2026 edition, https://www.businesstoday.com.my/2025/10/30/anwar-enters-global-top-10-of-most-influential-muslims/
- Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Islamic_Strategic_Studies_Centre
- Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Aal_al-Bayt_Institute_for_Islamic_Thought
- H.R.H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, “Twenty Years of Historic Religious Initiatives”, RISSC, 2013, https://rissc.jo/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/www.freeislamiccalligraphy.com_docs_Prince-Ghazi-20-Years-EN-Low.pdf
- Dearborn Blog, “Dearborn Voted in Record Numbers and Changed Michigan”, November 6, 2026, https://dearbornblog.com/2026/11/06/dearborn-voted-record-turnout-el-sayed-green-vote/
Editorial Disclaimer
This article reports on and analyses the 2027 edition of The Muslim 500, published by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, Jordan. All rankings, counts, and descriptions of the book contents are drawn from the publisher PDF of that edition, read in full, with year on year comparisons checked against published coverage of the 2026 edition. Where the article describes events in 2026, including the war on Iran, the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the missile strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh school, and the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, it reports what the book records, and the casualty and damage figures for Gaza and the West Bank are the figures cited in the book feature, attributed there to the Gaza Ministry of Health, United Nations bodies, and other named sources. The ethnic and communal analysis in this article is Dearborn Blog’s own reading, built from the book country and category sortings, and it is labelled as such; the book itself does not sort people by ethnicity. The inclusion of a person in The Muslim 500 does not mean Dearborn Blog endorses that person views, and the book itself states the same. Dearborn Blog writes from Green Party values: peace over war, diplomacy over expulsion, international law over the law of the stronger, opposition to occupation, and self determination of peoples. Nothing in this article should be read as a claim that the book rankings are a measurement rather than the editors’ judgment, which the article states plainly.
