It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, and purchased in 2021 for $298 million by John Wiley & Sons, a large US-based publishing company.

Since 2007, all of Hindawi's journals have been open access and published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

In 2010, Hindawi was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall, but was removed from the list following a successful appeal.

[6] Over the next years, the number of articles in Hindawi journals grew exponentially, the majority being published in special issues.

[3] In the fall of 2022, Hindawi announced the retraction of more than 500 articles in 16 of its scientific journals because of cheating involving some of its editors and peer reviewers.

[26] Two major factors facilitating the company's growth have been the low labor costs and well-educated middle class of Cairo.

[28] In March 2023, multiple Hindawi journals were delisted from the Web of Science for concerns with their editorial practices.

[32][clarification needed] Some light probes of the editorial quality of the review process of Hindawi publications using sting operations uncovered no obvious problems.

In 2013, the two Hindawi journals (Chemotherapy Research and Practice and ISRN Oncology) targeted in the Who's Afraid of Peer Review?

[36] In 2015, after an internal investigation, Hindawi flagged 32 published papers for re-review due to three editors subverting the peer review process with fake email accounts.

[39][40] In December 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a list of journals that may suffer from issues of scientific quality and other risk characteristics.

[41] In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance.

Hindawi has also been criticized for its use of unsolicited e-mail, with some claiming it is the chief method of attracting manuscripts and editorial board members.