Khalil Andani holds a Ph.D in Islamic Studies from Harvard University (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) and serves as an Assistant Professor of Religion at Augustana College. Khalil Andani's dissertation, “Revelation in Islam: Qurʾanic, Sunni, and Shiʿi Ismaili Perspectives”, was awarded Best Ph.D. Dissertation of the Year by the Foundation for Iranian Studies in 2020. His first book, based on this dissertation, will be an analytical and historical investigation of...

Professor Liyakat Takim is the Sharjah Chair in Global Islam at McMaster University in Canada. A prolific writer and speaker he has authored and/or translated eight books. He is currently working on his ninth book on Qur’anic exegesis. He has also written more than one hundred and forty scholarly works which have been published in various journals, books, and encyclopediae. Professor Takim’s research interests lie in topics such as reformation in Islam, Qur’anic exegesis, the role of custom...

Hossam Ouf is currently a research fellow at the Chair of Hadith Studies and Prophetic Tradition at the Center for Islamic Theology in Tübingen, where he researches and teaches Hadith and Sira. He also received his doctorate in 2022 from the University of Tübingen. His dissertation entitled “Hadith Transmission and Confessionality: A Comparative study of “al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ” of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) and “al-Kāfī” of alKulaynī (d. 329/940) in the Sunni and Twelver Shiite hadith sciences.” He...

Mushegh Asatryan is Associate Professor of Arabic and Muslim Cultures and Director of the Language Research Centre at the University of Calgary (Canada). His research interests include the history of Islamic sectarianism, interreligious debate in the Abbasid empire, esoteric movements in Shiʿism, and Late Antique trends in Islamic thought. His works include Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam, the forthcoming study and critical edition of Manhaj al-ʿIlm wa l-Bayān by the Nuṣayrī author...

Mohammad Ghandehari is a scholar of Islamic studies. He holds a Ph.D. (on Kitāb Sulaym) from the University of Tehran, Department of Qurʾanic and Hadith Studies and is now a research fellow at the University of Religions and Denominations. His primary research interests are Early Hadith, Methodological approaches to the study of Hadith and the conversation of the Qurʾan with the Bible. His publications include “Facing Mirrors: The intertwined golden calf story” (2018). Among the courses he...

Haidar Hobballah completed his PhD in Comparative Religions and Christian Theology at the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom, Iran. Prior to this, he spent several years studying in various seminaries and universities in Qom. He is currently the Head of the Department of Hadith and History and a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham, UK. Alongside this, he continues to teach advanced courses (dars khārij) in various disciplines of Islamic...

Gurdofarid Miskinzoda is the Head of the Shiʿi Studies Unit in the Department of Academic Research and Publication at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. She is also the Managing Editor of the Shiʿi Heritage Series. Miskinzoda’s academic background is in the fields of the history of the Near and Middle East and of Islam, Islamic Studies, philology and the study of Arabic and Persian literatures. She is the editor (with Farhad Daftary) of The Study of Shiʿi Islam: History, Theology and Law...

George Warner is a scholar of Islamic studies specialising in Sunni- Shiʿa relations, hadith, ritual, and devotional literature in Arabic and Persian. He has taught at RuhrUniversität Bochum and SOAS University of London, where he completed his PhD in 2017, and is currently based at the University of Exeter in the UK. His first book, ‘The Words of the Imams: al-Shaykh al-Saduq and the Development of Twelver Shi'i Hadith Literature,’ was published in 2021 by I. B. Tauris.

Bekir Kuzudişli is a Professor at Istanbul University in Turkey. He completed his doctorate in 2005 with the thesis title of: “Ḥadīth Narration and Family Isnād”. Kuzudişli is now the Head of the Institute of Islamic Studies. Following his research on hadith narration and asānīd in Shiʿism, his current research interests focus is on asānīd, the history of ḥadīth, Orientalism, and ḥadīth in Shiʿism. Kuzudişli has academic publications in Turkish, Arabic and English. Some of his works include...

Ali Rida Rizek (Ph.D., Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Göttingen 2021) is a scholar of the social and intellectual history of Islam, with a particular focus on Twelver Shiʿism. He received his BA and MA in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon. He has taught at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Lebanese American University (LAU), the University of Leiden, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Bayreuth in...

Ali Aghaei is a Research Associate at the Institute of Islamic Theology of the University of Paderborn. He holds a MA and PhD in Qurʾan and Hadith Studies from Usul ad-Din College in Qom (2002) and Islamic Azad University in Tehran (2012). From 2004 to 2013, Aghaei contributed to the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam (Dāneshnāmeh-ye Jahān-e Eslām) being a member of the Academic Board of the Encyclopedia Islamica Foundation, Tehran. In the academic year 2013/2014, he was a post-doctorate...

On 7th February 2024, Dr Ali Rida Rizek presented a research seminar at AMI entitiled ‘Between Ibn al-Junayd al-Iskāfī and al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī: Legal disagreement (khilāf) in Early Imami hadith Compendia.’ In his presentation, he spoke about the various tools and methods employed by Shiʿi scholars such as al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī and al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī and how they dealt with the legal and hadith disagreements regarding Ibn al-Junayd al-Iskāfī. Dr Rizek argued that while al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī made use of...

On 30th January 2024, Farhana Mayer presented a research seminar at AMI on ‘Qur’anic Principles of Integral Ecology’, based on her publication Praise to God, Lord of the Worlds, An Introduction to Qur’anic Ecology and Resonances with Laudato Si’ (Laudato Si’ Research Institute, Oxford, 2023). In her presentation, having highlighted that integral ecology is based on the idea that everything is interconnected and includes socio-economic as well as environmental matters, she explained how the...

In this research seminar, Ali highlighted the important but relatively unknown philosophical contributions of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, an influential 20th century Shia Islamic thinker from Iraq. He drew insightful parallels between al-Sadr’s ideas on morality and ethics and those of the modern philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Ali noted how both thinkers are deeply critical of modernity and see potential in reviving and adapting Aristotelian virtue ethics to address contemporary moral problems....

This book provides detailed and multidisciplinary coverage of a wealth of key Qur’anic terms, with incisive entries on crucial expressions ranging from the divine names allāh (“God”) and al-raḥmān (“the Merciful”) to the Qur’anic understanding of belief and self-surrender to God. It examines what the terms mean in Qur’anic usage, discusses how to translate them into English, and delineates the role they play in expressing the Qur’an’s distinctive understanding of God, humans, and the cosmos....

Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) of Damascus was one of the most prominent and controversial religious scholars of medieval Islam. He called for jihad against the Mongol invaders of Syria, appealed to the foundational sources of Islam for reform, and battled against religious innovation. Today, he inspires such diverse movements as Global Salafism, Islamic revivalism and modernism, and violent jihadism. This volume synthesizes the latest research, discusses many little-known aspects of Ibn Taymiyya’s...

Modern biomedical technologies managed to revolutionise the End-of-Life Care (EoLC) in many aspects. The dying process can now be “engineered” by managing the accompanying physical symptoms or by “prolonging/hastening” death itself. Such interventions questioned and problematised long-established understandings of key moral concepts, such as good life, quality of life, pain, suffering, good death, appropriate death, dying well, etc. This volume examines how multifaceted EoLC moral questions...

This book examines all verses of the Quran involving knowledge related concepts. It begins with the argument that an analysis of the Quranic concept of ignorance points to epistemic virtues that can pave our way towards gaining knowledge and/or understanding. It deals with the Quranic concepts of perceptual, rational, and revelatory knowledge as well as understanding and wisdom in the light of recent discussions in Western analytic epistemology. It also argues that the relevant Quranic verses...

Dr. Nebil Husayn delivers a research seminar examining an early pro-ʿAlid epistle attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) that defends his claims to leadership and critiques his rivals. The epistle emerged in the context of intra-army disputes after ʿAlī’s companions were murdered. While the work survives primarily in Twelver Shīʿī sources like those of al-Qummī, al-Kulaynī, Ibn Rustam al-Ṭabarī, and Ibn Ṭāwūs, some Sunni historians like al-Balādhurī also referenced it, indicating early...

The Islamic tradition has always held animals in high esteem, deserving the same level of consideration as humans. The Qur'an opines that "there is not an animal in the earth nor a flying creature flying on two wings, but they are people like you." This fascinating and highly original book examines the status and nature of animals as they are portrayed in the Qur'an and in adjacent exegetical works, in which animals are viewed as spiritual, moral, intelligent, and accountable beings. In this...

An Anxious Inheritance reveals the tensions between the early framers of Islam and the ever-expandable category of non-Muslims. Examining the encounter with these religious others, and showing how the Qur'an functioned as both a script to understand them and a map to classify them, this study traces the key role that these religious others played in what would ultimately emerge as (Sunni) orthodoxy. This orthodoxy would appear to be the natural outgrowth of the Prophet Muhammad's preaching,...

The late Michael Dols in his book on the Majnūn rightly asserted that when dealing with madmen in medieval Islamic societies, we need to have in mind a model of medical pluralism. He had spotted the various intersections of genres of texts and learning, and even sociological classes and behavioral norms in his examination of madness, more broadly, and lovesickness (ʿishq), in particular. In this chapter, I shall focus on the discussions on lovesickness from five medical commentaries from the...

Dr Fella Lahmar presents "Educational challenges facing the role & scope of female scholarship"

Dr Mansooreh Saniei (King’s College London) While considering the relationship between ethics, religion, and regulatory policy in the field of emerging life sciences and technologies, this presentation focuses on the politics of embryo, specifically embryo donation for modern medically assisted reproduction and embryo research, and debates about its status in the context of Shiism, with particular reference to Iran with a majority Shia population in the Middle East and North Africa. It shows...