One of his main contributions was the development of a transliteration of the Qur'an, which enabled non-Arabic speakers to understand and recite Quranic Arabic.

In the professional world, he was granted a master's degree [M.Arch] in Islamic Building in 1983 by Dr. Hasan Fathy of the Institute of Appropriate Technology in Kuwait.

During his childhood, he periodically visited New York City, where his mother taught school, his father was in the hotel business, and his grandfather worked as a ship chandler and cargo consolidator for the North Atlantic convoys.

During this time he served as Coordinator and Director of Programs and established contact with teachers of many traditions, including Kalu Rinpoche and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

He also traveled in the desert regions of North America and embarked on excursions to the Indian Subcontinent and Middle East, where he first came into contact with Muslims.

During this period he studied Tasawwuf with Muhammad al-Jamal, Na'ib of the Mufti of al-Quds, Hazim Abu-l-Ghazali of Amman, Jordan, and Abu Mutalib ash-Sharif of al-Khalil, all of whom were sheikhs of the Shadhdhuliyyah Order.

During this time, he developed the idea of a Muslim school and community in the United States and began raising funds for the project.

From 1980 to 1988, on the first day of the new Hijri 1400, he was the sole signatory on incorporation papers for the Dar al-Islam Foundation in Abiquiu, New Mexico, which he co-founded in 1979.

During his term, the foundation grew from an idea to a physical reality that, at the time of his leaving office, had assets of $7 million USD, was debt-free, and in full operation, which included a mosque, a school, residences, and small businesses.

During this same period, he also studied the Shadhdhuliyyah Shari'ah Way for Lovers of Qur'an and Sunnah with Ibrahim Muhammad al-Batawi, who was a Professor of Islamic Philosophy for over 25 years at al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

He also studied the science of Muraqabah (inner contemplation) with the Mujaddidi Naqshabandi Shaykh, Dr. Seyed 'Ali Ashraf, professor of Islamic Education at King Abdu-l-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and later Professor of Education at the Oxford University in the United Kingdom, who granted him an 'Ijaza to teach Muraqabah.

In 1983, he was awarded an 'Ijaza in Islamic Calling (da’wa) from Umar Abdullaah, a Ba'Alawi shaykh from Comoros who served as the Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1994, he returned to the United States and settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he began working full-time on the Tajwidi Qur'an, which was published in 2003.

He also established the an-Noor Foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3), specifically for the publication of the Tajiwidi Qur'an and for the propagation of traditional moderate Islam.

Its English is edited by Hajja Noura Durkee, with Arabic text hand-written by Munshi Muhammad Sharif and orthography by 'Ustadh Zafar 'Iqbal.

The transliteration is an improvement over previously done work by Muhammad A. H. Eliasi (Golden Press, Hyderabad, India, 1978) on a number of grounds including: 1.

Orisons of the Shadhuliyyah (first published in Alexandria, Egypt in 1991) is the translation from Arabic of three books that deal with the origins of the Shadhdhuli School of Sufism.

Nooruddeen translated these passages in collaboration with Dr. Ma’ddawi az-Zirr and then edited and prepared it for publishing during his five-year stay (1989–94) in Alexandria.

In 1975, while studying at the Markaz al-Lughat al-Arabiyyah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Durkee met a businessman and industrialist named Sahl Kabbani who was to become his partner in the endeavor of Dar al-Islam.

[3] American Muslims would be able to engage in daily interactions according to their beliefs, and in manifesting their faith, they would bear witness (da'wah) of Islam to others.

It was one of almost thirty communes established in the region around that time, and one of the most well-known, along with Morningstar East, Reality Construction Company, the Hog Farm, New Buffalo, and The Family.

It sponsors a weekly ma'idatu-l-rahmah (table of mercy), which serves orphans and widows from the refugee community, local university students and professors, and others among the poor, recently imprisoned, and broken-hearted to eat together, pray together, make dhikr together, and read Qur'an together.