Al-Mus'haf Al-Murattal (Shu‘ba) – Adel Al Kalbani

Sheikh Adel Al Kalbani (Adil ibn Salim ibn Sa'id al-Kalbani), born in Riyadh in 1959 (1378 AH), is a Saudi imam and Quran reciter. After some twenty years as imam of the King Khalid Mosque in Riyadh, he was chosen by King Abdullah in 2008 to lead Ramadan Tarawih prayers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, becoming, as The New York Times reported, the first Black man to lead prayers there.

Background and education

His father came to Saudi Arabia in the 1950s from Ras al-Khaimah, now part of the United Arab Emirates, and worked as a low-level government clerk. The family had little money: after high school Adel spent about six years working for Saudi Arabian Airlines while taking evening classes at King Saud University.

Only then did he turn to religious study. He learned the Quran with Sheikh Ahmad Mustafa and Sheikh Muhammad Nabhan ibn Husayn and holds an ijaza in some of the Quranic readings. He also read the hadith collections of al-Bukhari and al-Tirmidhi and the tafsir of Ibn Kathir with Sheikh Hasan ibn Ghanim al-Ghanim, the tafsir of al-Baydawi with Mustafa Muslim, and Ibn Taymiyya's al-Tadmuriyya with Sheikh Abdullah ibn Jibrin.

Imam in Riyadh and Mecca

Having passed the government examination for imams in 1984, he served briefly at the Riyadh airport mosque before becoming imam of the King Khalid Mosque in Umm al-Hamam in 1988, a post he held for about twenty years and where he made his name as a reciter with a deep baritone voice. On 4 Ramadan 1429 (September 2008) a royal decree assigned him to help lead the Tarawih prayers at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, broadcast around the world. The assignment ended with Ramadan and he returned to Riyadh, where he was imam of the al-Muhaisen Mosque in the Ishbiliya district from its opening in 1430 AH (2009) until 1442 AH (2021). At the King Khalid Mosque he was succeeded by Sheikh Khalid Al Jalil.

Preaching and public stances

Besides lecturing across the kingdom, he has appeared on many television programmes, including on Al-Ekhbariya, Kuwait TV and Al Arabiya, wrote for the daily Al-Riyadh from 2012, and presented the show Ma'a al-Kalbani on Saudi television in Ramadan 2019. In 2010 a religious opinion in which he held singing and musical instruments to be permissible drew sharp criticism from several Saudi scholars, including the Grand Mufti; he withdrew it the same year, then restated it in 2019.

Recitation

His complete murattal recitation of the Quran follows the reading of Hafs 'an 'Asim; he has also recorded in the Shu'ba transmission.

Adel Al Kalbani