Zakir Naik was born in Bombay, now Mumbai, in 1965 and trained in medicine before setting aside clinical practice to focus on public speaking about comparative religion, a shift that placed him in a long tradition of Muslim speakers who engage directly with the texts and beliefs of other faiths rather than address Islam in isolation. His approach centered on structured comparisons between the Quran and other religious scriptures, delivered in a lecture format that regularly incorporated open audience questions, a style that built him a following well before he had any television platform of his own.
In 1991 he formalized that work by founding the Islamic Research Foundation in Mumbai, a nonprofit organization built to support and extend his comparative religion outreach. The foundation's reach expanded enormously in 2006 when Naik launched Peace TV from Dubai, moving his lecture-and-answer format from live halls and cassette recordings onto a satellite channel that could reach any household with a dish, anywhere the signal traveled. Sister channels in Urdu, Bangla and for a period Chinese followed over the next decade, each carrying largely the same format to new language audiences.
By the network's own reported figures, Naik's lectures reached an estimated 200 million viewers across more than 200 countries at Peace TV's broadest extent, making him one of the most widely broadcast individual religious speakers in the world by the network's own account of its distribution, a scale built almost entirely on one man's speaking career and the broadcasting infrastructure he built specifically to carry it.