Muslims and the Study of the Future

Ali Al-Timimi, born 14 December 1963, is an American computational biologist and Islamic teacher from Fairfax County, Virginia. His father (d. 2010), an attorney, was the cultural attaché at the embassy of the then Kingdom of Iraq. His mother, a mental health specialist with a doctorate in special education, initially taught at St. John's Child Development Center for intellectually disabled children. Later in the mid-1970s, she was a dean at Mt. Vernon College for Women.

At age fifteen, in 1978, his parents moved the family to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for two years to expose them to their Islamic heritage where he attended Manarat Riyadh High School, learned Arabic and studied Islam under the Imam Bilal Phillips.

In 1981, Al-Timimi returned to the United States and enrolled in a premed program at The George Washington University, returning then to Saudi Arabia in 1987, where he studied for a year at the Islamic University of Madinah and became a student of 'Abdul-'Aziz ibn Baz.

At his parents' urging, he returned to the United States after a year and earned a second undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Maryland. He later earned a Ph.D. in computational biology from George Mason University in 2004, after defending his doctoral thesis titled "Chaos and Complexity in Cancer."

He was convicted of soliciting treason and attempting to contribute services to the Taliban based on comments he is alleged to have made to a group of followers at a private dinner shortly after 9/11 and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison in 2005.

On April 27, 2020, attorneys filed a motion for his conditional release from prison pending the remainder of his appeal, arguing that intervening Supreme Court authority had cast doubt on the charges that continued to subject him to imprisonment, and that the COVID-19 pandemic additionally presented an exceptional reason justifying his release. The motion was granted and he was granted a conditional release into home confinement while he pursues his appeal.

(s) Adapted from Wikipedia