The 500 Most Influential Muslims is an annual publication first published in 2009, which ranks the most influential Muslims in the world.

Muhammad Taqi Usmani SI, OI, is a Pakistani jurist and a leading scholar in the fields of Qur'an, Hadith, Islamic law, Islamic economics, and comparative religion. He was a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology from 1977 to 1981, a judge of the Federal Shariat Court from 1981 to 1982, and a judge in the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan from 1982 to 2002. In 2020, he was selected as the most influential Muslim personality in the world. He has been conferred the title of Shaykh al-Islām for his knowledge in Islamic studies. He is considered a leading intellectual of the contemporary Deobandi movement, and his opinions and fatwas are widely accepted by Deobandi scholars and institutions worldwide, including the Darul Uloom Deoband in India. Since 2021, he has been serving as the Chairman of Wifaq ul Madaris Al-Arabia. His father, Shafi Usmani, was the Grand Mufti of Darul Uloom Deoband and migrated to Pakistan with his family after the partition of India in 1948.