Associated Staff Members

Professor Dionisius A. Agius FBA

Professor Siam Bhayro

Dr Semih Celik

Dr John P. Cooper

Dr Ahmed Dailami

Professor William Gallois

Dr Geoffrey Hughes

Professor Timothy Insoll

Professor Emeritus Ian Netton

Research Staff

Dr Marya Hannun
(Specialisms: Islamic law, gender, and intellectual history of modern Afghanistan)

Dr Bianka Speidl
(Specialisms: political theories and environmental ethics in Imami Shiʿite Islam, Muslim-Christian dialogue in the Middle East, Contemporary Eastern Christianity)

Dr Marianna Zarantonello
(Specialisms: Islamic law, gender, and intellectual history of modern Afghanistan)

Honorary Research Fellows

Dr Saud Al-Sarhan

Former Research Visiting and Honorary Fellows

Dr Omar Anchassi
(Specialisms: Islamic Intellectual history (modern and premodern), Islamic law and legal theory, kalām-theology, and Qurʾānic studies)

Dr Belal El Abbas
(Specialisms: Islamic law and legal theory, Classical Sufism, Quranic Exegesis, The history of the hadith corpus as a discipline and literary genre.)

Samer El-Karanshawy

Sara Forcella

Dr Sejad Mekic
(Specialisms: Islamic law and jurisprudence, fatwas ands their interpretation in the odern period, Islamic law in the Balkans)

Dr Luca Patrizi

Dr Davide Pettinato
(Specialisms: Islamic charities in the Europe, NGOs and International Development in the Muslim World, Islamic perspectives on Climate Change)

Dr Christophe (Pooya) Razavian
(Specialisms: Modern Islamic philosophy and ethics, contemporary Iranian thought, digital humanities)

Dr Raha Rafii
(Specialisms: Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam)

Dr Amin Ehteshami
(Specialisms: Classical Islamic theology and law, Islamic legal theory, hadith and canonisation)

Dr Paul Gledhill
(Law and Learning in Imami Shiite Islam research fellow project; specialisms: early Islamic law and the formation of the law schools)

Dr Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh
(Specialisms: Islamic mysticism, Sufism, religion and modernity, comparative mysticism, Persian literature)

Dr Cameron Zargar
(Specialisms: Modern Shiism, Clerical Authority, the theory and practice of taqlid)

Current PhD Students

Sayed Ismail Albehbehani, The Inhabitants of al-Baḥrayn and Kāẓima in Late Antiquity

Ahmed Aldhubayi

Mohammad Ashkanani, The Reception and Survival of the Poetry of Imruʾ al-Qays from the pre-Islamic to the Abbasid Era

Hassan Asiri, The Implicit Patterns in the Hijazi Sensual Ghazal Poetry during the Umayyad Era – A New Historicist Interpretation

Bryar Bajalan

Shahanaz Begum, From Language to Law – Islamic Legal Hermeneutics in the Formative Period

Alice van den Bosch, Creating the Female Martyr in Late Antique North Africa

Majida Deeb Ibrahim, Prominent Features and Translation Strategies of Arabic Feminist Literature: The case of Nawal el-Saadawi and Hanan al-Shaykh

Amir Mohammad Emami, What Has Athens to Do with Mecca and Medina? Mīrzā Mahdī Iṣfahānī (d. 1365/1946) on God, the Human, and Their Relation

Alexander Hainy-Khaleeli

Uzair Ibrahim, Amid Worlds Seen and Unseen: The Imam, the Ghayb, and History in South Asian Shiʿi Islam

Zahra Jafari, Treating Ḥadīth Contradictions by Means of Dissimulation in ShīʿīḤadīth Tradition by Yūsuf b. Aḥmad al-Baḥrānī

Hatice Kubra Memis, The Legal and Ethical Status of the Embryos in Islam

Arghavan Moharrami, The Winds of Zār: On Occult Performance among Black Indigenous Communities in the Persian Gulf

Abdulla Saad Moaswes

Elias Ragi, Why Is Death, in Mikhail Naimy’s Literature, Looked at Conflictingly between Punishment and Reward?

Hasti Safavi, The Shrine Ensemble of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili: An Islamic Philosophical Analysis

Mohammad-Payam Saadat Sarmadi, Devil’s Device: Islamic debates about legal analogy in the formative period

Dilshad Sharif

Catherine Tollerton, Is Piety Among Women Important in Understanding the Deoband Movement?

Ibrahim Urkac

Farhan Zaidi, The Ontology and Epistemology of Revelation in MullāṢadrā 

Awarded PhD Students

Faris Abdel-Hadi,Scope of Ibn Arabi's Pluralism - Degrees of Inclusivity 

Saliha Osama Farid Abdelkhalek, Being, Reification and Ritual: The Esoteric Paradigm of Ibn Arabi 

Francis Acquah, The Impact of African Traditional Religious Beliefs and Cultural Values on Christian-Muslim Relations in Ghana from the 1920 to the Present: A Case Study of the Nkusukum-Ekumfi-Enyan traditional area of the Central Region

Babar Ahmed, The Rational Psychology of Perfect Being Theology: Towards a New Islamic Hermeneutics 

Zubir Rasool Ahmed, Rebuilding the Iraqi State: The Regional Dimension of Ethno-Sectarian Conflict (2003-2016)

Jaber Mohammed Alahmari, Arab poets’ perspectives on the arts Until the end of the 5th / 11th Century A thematic and rhetorical analytical approach 

Usama Al-Atar, Theology of Nahj al-Balāgha 

Ranyh Alatawi,  Abū‘Abdullāh Muḥammad b. ‘Umar al-Wāqidī’s Historiography of the Prophet Muhammad’s Military Expeditions (A Critical Study of the Methododology with Special Focus on al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī) 

Khalid Abdulaziz Aldakheel, Development of Awareness: The Power of Society and Men in the Saudi Women's Novel 

Ahmad Alfaraj,  The Influence of the Discovery of Oil on the Poetry of a Selection of Modern Blind Poets from the Gulf Region 

Saleh Owaid Alharbi, The Image of the West in Saudi poetry 1920-1990 

Ghazoan Ali, Substance and Things: Dualism and Unity in the Early Islamic Cultural Field 

Mehrdad Alipour, Negotiating Homosexuality in Contemporary Shīʿī Islam: a legal-hermeneutical analysis of Twelver Imāmī Shīʿī Islamic sources 

Salih Maddah H Aljedani,  The Holy Mosque in Mecca: A Study with Notes and Commentary of the Manuscript by Abu Abd Allah Muhammad al-Mahjub Entitled Qurrat al-c Ayn fi Awsaf al-Haramayn (Circa 9th/15th Century) 

Maryam Alkandari, The Social Status of Female Slaves at the Abbasid Court (132-329 A.H./ 750-940 A.D.) 

Ahmed Mukhtar Tweirsh Al-Malik, The Image of the Other: Representations of East-West Encounters in Anglo-American and Arabic Novels (1991-2001) 

Abdullah Alobaid, Meta-Alexander- A New Complementary Model and Jurisprudential Theory for the Study of Muslim Historiography – 3rd/9th – 4th/10th Centuries 

Abdullah Abdulrahman A Aloraini,Argumentation and Poetry: A Pragmatic Literary Study of the Diwan Group’s Poetic Discourse 

Reem Saud Al Rudainy, The Role of Women in the Būyid and Saljūq Periods of the Abbasid Caliphate (339-447/9501055&447-547/1055-1152): The Case of Iraq 

Saud Saleh Al Sarhan, Early Muslim Traditionalism: A Critical Study of the Works and Political Theology of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal

Asma Abdulrahim Alshaiban, An analytical study of Ibn Wāṣil’s Mufarrij al-Kurūb fī Akhbār Banī Ayyūb (The Dissipater of Anxieties in the Report of the Ayyubids) The Political Historiography of Women in the late Ayyubid Dynasty: 589-648/1193-1250 

Yasmin Amin, Humour in the Ḥadīth 

Mohammed Faia Asiri, A Saudi Representation of America and the Americans An Imagological Study of Ghazi Al-Gosaibi’s Works

Hamdullah Baycar, Nationalism and Tolerance Discourse in the United Arab Emirates Balancing Exclusive Belonging and Inclusive Non-Belonging 

Ahab Bdaiwi, Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna: An Intellectual History of the Philosophers of Shiraz 

Hasan J E H M Beloushi, The Theory of Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿa in Shīʿī Jurisprudence: Muḥammad Taqī al-Mudarrisī as a Model 

Yousef Bennaji, Echoes of the Fall of the Umayyads in Traditional and Modern Sources: A Case Study of the Final Eight Years of the Umayyad Empire with Some Reference to Gramsci’s Theory of Cultural Hegemony 

Mohamed Bin Ali, The Islamic Doctrine of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (Loyalty and Disavowal) in Modern Salafism

Mohd Khairul Anam Bin Che Mentri, Avicenna on Knowledge 

Corrie Jonn Block, Expanding the Qur'anic Bridge 

Amirah Bukhari, Casting a New Light on al-Jurjānī’s naẓm-i‘jāz Theory: Studies in Language and Exegesis in the Modern and Pre-Modern Era 

Michael Calabria, “The Foremost of Believers:” The Egyptians in the Qur’ān, Islamic Exegesis, and Extra-Canonical Texts 

Leila Chamankhah, The Concept of Guardianship (wilāya) in the Iranian Intellectual Tradition From 1800 to 1989, With Particular Reference to the Ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini 

Rhiannon Conner, From Amuq to Glastonbury: Situating the apocalypticism of Shaykh Nazim and the Naqshbandi-Haqqaniyya 

Minlib Dallh, A Mystical Encounter of a Dominican Friar, Serge de Beaurecueil (d. 2005), and a Hanbalī Sūfī, ‘Abdullāh AnSārī of Herāt (d. 1089) 

Zamira Imatovna Dildorbekova, The Dynamics of Islam and Modernity in Tajikistan: Contemporary Ismaili Discourse

Fawzy Shaban Elgariani, Al-Qawa'id al-Fiqhiyyah (Islamic Legal Maxims): Concept, Functions, History, Classifications and Application to Contemporary Medical Issues

Sherry Sayed Gad Elrab ElSayed, Dangerous Sexualities: The Construction of Sexual Knowledge in Egypt, 1800-1928

Miles Elwell, Existential Religiosity, Individuality, and Theosis in the Thought of Bishop George Khodr 

Zoheir Ali Esmail, Between Philosophy and ʿIrfān: Interpreting MullāṢadrā from the Qajars to Post-Revolutionary Iran 

Adelbert Finch, Squaring the Circle: The Suspended Person Thought Experiment’s Conditions Approved Apperception as an Onto-Epistemic Basis for MullāṢadrā’s Existentialist Psychology

Robert Fuller, The orientation of the Kaʿba to Jerusalem: two sanctuaries. An older love affair? 

Massimiliano Fusari, Post-Produced Cultures - Meta-Images, Aesthetics and the Hawzas

Usman Ghani, ‘Abu Hurayra’ a Narrator of Hadith Revisited: An Examination into the Dichotomous Representations of an Important Figure in Hadith with special reference to Classical Islamic modes of Criticism 

Shayesteh Ghofrani, Comparative Analysis of wilāya in the Formative Period of Shiʿism and Sufism 

Rahim Gholami, “The Wayfarer’s Sojourn At The Banquet: The Hermeneutics Of Nāṣir-e Khusraw’s Esoteric Guidance” (With A Parallel English Translation and New Persian Critical Edition of Nāṣir-e Khusraw’s Khwān Al-Ikhwān) 

John Goodman, A Different Path: The Minority Muslim Experience in Southeast Asia 

Emad Hamdeh, The Emergence of an Iconoclast: Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī and His Critics

Khalifa Ezzat Abuzeid Hassan, People of the Book An Analytical Study of Jews and Christians in the Qur’an With Particular Reference to Contemporary Exegetical Discourse 

Omneya Nabil Muhammad Ibrahim, Divine Love in the Moroccan Sufi Tradition: Ibn ‘Ajība (d. 1224/1809) and His Oceanic Exegesis of the Qur’ān 

Amina Inloes, Negotiating Shīʿī Identity and Orthodoxy through Canonizing Ideologies about Women in Twelver Shīʿī Aḥādīth on Pre-Islamic Sacred History in the Qurʾān 

Tajul Islam,  Scholastic Traditional Minimalism: A Critical Analysis of Intra-Sunni Sectarian Polemics 

Jewel Hossain Jalil, The Consolidation of the Ḥanbalī Law School between 4th/10th – 6th/12th Centuries 

Fouad Jabir Kadhem, The 'ulama of Najaf in Iraqi Politics between 1950 and 1980 

Colleen Marie Keyes, The Significance of Edward Said’s Notion of “Secular” Criticism in his Work on Islam and the Problematic of Palestine-Israel 

Majid Montazer Mahdi, Politics of Collective Biographies of Shiʿi Ulama in the 17th and 18th Centuries: The Case of Amal al-Āmil and Luʾluʾat al-Baḥrayn 

Hamid Reza Maghsoodi, The Role of ʿaql in the Thought of Mīrzā Mahdī Iṣfahānī 

Abdelghani Mimouni, Debating al-Ḥākimiyyah and Takfīr in Salafism: The Genesis of Intra-Salafī Schism in the 1990s 

Yasmin Hanani Mohd Safian, Necessity (darura) in Islamic Law: A study with special reference to the Harm Reduction Programme in Malaysia 

Walead Mohammed Mosaad, The Transmission of the Islamic Tradition in the Early Modern Era: The Life and Writings of Aḥmad Al-Dardīr 

Rishad Raffi Motlani, Islam, Euthanasia and Western Christianity: Drawing on Western Christian thinking to develop an expanded Western Sunni Muslim perspective on euthanasia 

Assmaa Mohamed Naguib, Representations of ‘Home’ from the Setting of ‘Exile’: Novels by Arab Migrant Writers 

Namira Nahouza, Contemporary Wahhabism rebranded as Salafism : the issue of interpreting the Qur'anic verses and hadith on the Attributes of God and its significance

Caroline Neumueller, The 21st Century New Muslim Generation: Converts in Britain and Germany

Farag I.M. Omar, Structures of government in Almohad Iberia 

Sümeyye Parıldar, Intentionality in MullāṢadrā 

Davide Domenico Pettinato, Understanding the Discourse of British Muslim NGOs: Islamic Relief and MADE as Case Studies 

Kumail Rajani, Making Sense of Ismaili Traditions: The Modes and Meanings of the Transmission of Ḥadīth in the Works of al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān (d. 363/974) 

Christopher Pooya Razavian, The Discursive Self: Rethinking the Relationship Between Autonomy and Tradition in Shi’i Thought 

Carla E Roland, Why Can't They Be More Like Us? Baptism and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Spain 

Geoffrey Brandon Sage, The Muwashshah, Zajal, and Kharja: What came before and what became of them 

Mohammed Sanad,A Multidisciplinary Investigation of Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī’s Literary Heritage (d. 395- 400 AH-1005 CE), Insights from Lexicography, Linguistics, and Literary Criticism 

Zainab Sayed Zahed, The Imaginary Context in Nahj al-Balāghah: Theory and Practice 

Amir Shaharuddin, A Study on Mudarabah in Islamic Law and its Application in Malaysian Islamic Banks 

Ghulam Shamas ur Rehman, A Critical Edition of Qawaid al-Tasawwuf by Ahmad Zarruq (d. 899/1493) with Introduction 

Linda Marianne Sijbrand, The Social Role of Spiritual Communication: Authority as a Relationship between Shaykh and Follower in the Contemporary Ṭarīqa Shadhuliyya-Yashrutiyya in Amman, Acre and Jaffa 

Bianka Ágnes Speidl, Conceptualisation of Power in the Thought of Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah 

Khaled Troudi, Qurʾanic Hermeneutics with Reference to Narratives: A Study in Classical Exegetical Traditions 

Emine Enise Yakar, The Interaction Between Islamic Legal Methodologies and Social Context in the Light of the Contemporary Practice of Iftā’: A Case Study of Two Institutions 

Sümeyra Yakar, The Implicit Role of Custom ('URF) in the Islamic Juriprudence of Saudi Arabia and Iran, A Comparative Legal Study of Mu'amalat (Marriage and Divorce Rules) 

Farah Zeb, Ethical Conundrums and Lived Praxis: Queer Muslim Women in Malaysia and Lebanon