Shaykh Arif is the Director of al-Mahdi Institute, co-founder of CIMS and is a Senior Lecturer in Uṣūl al-fiqh and Muslim Philosophy at the Institute. He was educated at the Madrassah Syed Al- Khoei, London and continued his seminarian post-graduate studies in Qom, Iran. Alongside his studies, he also taught in Qom across a wide spectrum of the traditional Muslim scholarly disciplines.