Background
Jakub Szynkiewicz was born to a Tatar family on 16 April 1884 in Lyakhavichy (Lachowicze) in the Tsarist Russia (then and later part of Poland, today western Belarus). He was son of Sulejman and Fatma.
Jakub Szynkiewicz was born to a Tatar family on 16 April 1884 in Lyakhavichy (Lachowicze) in the Tsarist Russia (then and later part of Poland, today western Belarus). He was son of Sulejman and Fatma.
In 1904 he graduated from high school in Minsk, after which he first studied engineering sciences, but later in 1907 he decided to sudy Orientalism in Saint St. Petersburg.
In 1925 he earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Berlin with a dissertation in German language. Its headquarters was located in Vilnius. He translated a number of verses from the Quran from Arabic into Polish, published in 1935 under the title Wersety z Koranu.
Mufti Szynkiewicz also attended the Cairo caliphate congress in 1926.
He was central in the plans to build a mosque in Warsaw that was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. During World World War II he served as Mufti fuer die besetzten Ostgebiete.
In late 1944 he left and declined to return to Communist Poland. After the war he resettled in Egypt but moved to the United States of America following the pro-Soviet Nasser coup of 1952.
He died there on 1 November 1966.