Ustadh Yahya Birt 

Ustadh Yahya Birt is a research director at the Ayaan Institute in London, where he works on Muslim minorities. In 2022, his report, "Ummah at the Margins: The Past, Present, and Future of Muslim Minorities," was published. He is also a community historian who has taught at the University of Leeds. He has an M.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles on Islam in Britain, and his co-authored books include British Secularism and Religion (2016), Islam in Victorian Liverpool (2021), The Collected Poems of Abdullah Quilliam (2021) and Our Fatima of Liverpool (2023). In 2022, he published his first poetry collection, Pandemic Pilgrimage. He is a founding co-editor of the Oxford British Muslim Studies series at Oxford University Press. Currently, he is working with Dr. Fozia Bora on the history of Bradford's Somali Village, an ethnographic show of 100 Somali men, women, and children at the city's Lister Park in 1904.