Ahmed Saad Al-Azhari (Arabic: أحمد سعد الأزهري), is an Egyptian born, British Islamic scholar, and is the founder of the Ihsan Institute. He is an advocate of teaching traditional Islamic sciences; which he has taught in various parts of the world.

Saad completed the memorisation of the Qur’an at the age of ten, and studied basic Arabic and Islamic sciences at the hands of his father. He delivered his first Friday sermon at the age of 15, and led his first prayer at the age of 13. He memorized Al-Alfiyya of Ibn Malik at the age of 13 and Riyad As-Salihin of Al-Nawawi at the age of 15. He committed thousands of lines of poetry and prose to memory. He has memorized texts on logic, tajwid, aqidah, Arabic, rhetoric , and studied Maliki fiqh under Shaykh Abdul-Hamid Al-Shaykh Mubarak of Ahsa and many other sciences. He also holds one of the highest chains of the Qur’an among his peers with 29 people between him and the prophet Muhammad.

In 1988, he enrolled into Al-Azhar system of schools where he graduated with a B.A. (Hons) in Islamic Studies in English, from the Al-Azhar University in 2001. Throughout his career, Saad has studied Islamic sciences with scholars such as: former Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, Habib Abu Bakr Al-Mashhūr and Habib Umar bin Hafiz.

In 2024, Saad received a Doctor of Philosophy from the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham on Traditionalist Muslim scholars’ engagement with modernity through studying Habib Abu Bakr Al-Mashhūr’s intellectual project. In his Thesis, Dr. Saad challenged the current academic characterisation of traditional Muslim responses to modernity as obstructionist, disengaging and revanchist and thus overlooked. Through rigorous analysis of both the biography and intellectual core works of Habib Abu Bakr al-Mashhūr, 

Dr. Saad revealed diversity within those responses, an emerging decolonial narrative that calls for non-Eurocentric modernity that goes beyond the rhetorical question of “what went wrong”, and adopted pragmatic conservative and negotiating tone. Dr. Saad has also highlighted Al-Mashhūr’s genius approach that sees the constituents of the tradition as four; adding fiqh al-tahawwulāt (understanding transitions and changes), as an alternative analytical framework of reading history, to the archetypal three components of Islam, iman and ihsan that have been seen as the only components of the tradition. This expansion of the tradition’s components shows its potential to decolonise Muslim psychology and epistemology and proves its relevance and ability to the challenge of colonial modernity.