The Islamic Research Foundation was founded in Mumbai in 1991 by Zakir Naik, a Mumbai-born public speaker trained originally in medicine, who had turned his attention to comparative religious study and public preaching in the years before the foundation's creation. Its stated purpose was the "proper presentation, understanding and appreciation of Islam," pursued through lectures, publications and, from 2006 onward, its own satellite television network.
Peace TV, launched from Dubai on January 21, 2006, became the foundation's most visible and most consequential project. It carried Naik's own comparative religion lectures and question and answer sessions to an international audience that grew, according to figures the network itself reports, to roughly 200 million viewers across more than 200 countries by the network's own account, expanding into Urdu, Bangla and, for a time, Chinese language versions to serve audiences beyond its original English broadcasts.
For roughly a quarter century, the foundation operated as a Mumbai-based religious outreach organization whose reach was defined almost entirely by its founder's own media presence rather than by any institutional structure independent of him. That concentration would later matter a great deal when Indian authorities moved against the organization: unlike a denomination with distributed leadership, the Islamic Research Foundation was, in practice, largely one man's platform, which is part of why the foundation's legal troubles and its founder's personal legal troubles became, in the public record, difficult to separate from each other.