CIK Talks is a forum for esteemed Muslim intellectuals and thought leaders to address pressing issues confronting the Umma, as well as the ideas that are shaping the modern world.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in CIK Talks are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the teachings, views, and opinions of the Centre for Islamic Knowledge.

Contemplating Sufism: Dialogue and Tradition across Southeast Asia​

Friday, January 24th at 8 PM EST (24th Rajab)
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​Presented by: Professor Khairudin Aljunied
(National University of Singapore / International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization / Georgetown University / Ihya Journal of Islamic Thought) 

Discussant: Dr. Safaruk Chowdhury
(Centre for Islamic Knowledge / Ibn Rushd Centre for Excellence and Research / Journal of Islamic Philosophy / Islamic Literary Society)
This CIK Talk based on Dr. Khairudin’s new book Contemplating Sufism: Dialogue and Tradition across Southeast Asia explores the factors and forces that have enabled Islam to assert and embed itself in Southeast Asia. Using a unique “contemplative histories” methodology, Khairudin Aljunied reveals the multiple undercurrents that continue to influence Sufi thought and practices. The book argues that the Sufis employed creative and spirited dialogues with themselves and those they encountered to sustain their importance in Southeast Asia for many centuries.

Engaging and highly readable, Contemplating Sufism is filled with vignettes and anecdotes of Southeast Asian Sufism, including the author's ethnographic observations and personal experiences living and learning about Sufism. Concise chapters illustrate the inventiveness of the Sufis in spreading their ideas while highlighting their influence on ideological, emotional, cultural, political, and social changes in Southeast Asia. Uncovering how and why Sufism became an energetic force in Southeast Asian history, this book:

  • Provides an accessible and coherent synthesis of the latest scholarship in the field
  • Explores the various modes of Sufi engagement across Southeast Asia, with special attention paid to dialogue and the making of traditions
  • Offers vivid descriptions and rich analyses of texts, ideas, people, practices, and institutions that aided in the development of Sufism
  • Incorporates new data from repositories in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, South Thailand, Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States

Contemplating Sufism: Dialogue and Tradition across Southeast Asia is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses on Sufism across disciplines, such as philosophy, political science, history religious studies, and anthropology. It is also a valuable resource for academics, analysts, social scientists, legal scholars, and historians with an interest in the subject.
Dr. Khairudin Aljunied is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his BA and MA in History from the National University of Singapore in 2003 and completed his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 2008. Dr. Khairudin has studied and conducted research in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Khairudin has held a number of visiting positions. He was an Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University, Australia, in 2012. In 2013, he was a Fulbright Professor at Columbia University. More recently, Dr. Khairudin was a Visiting Professor at the University of Brunei (2015). He was appointed as Full Professor and the Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at Georgetown University (2017-2018) and maintains a position as Senior Fellow. A recognized specialist in the field of intellectual history, his research focuses on the connections between Southeast Asia and Global Islam. He is the author and editor of thirteen books and more than thirty internationally refereed articles. Recent publications include Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Hamka and Islam: Cosmopolitan Reform in the Malay World (Cornell University Press, 2018), Islam in Malaysia: An Entwined History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Shapers of Islam in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Previous Talks:
Dr. Raihan Ismail is the His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford. Dr. Raihan’s research interests include Political Islam, sectarianism, and the intertwining nature of religion and politics in the Middle East.

Before moving to Oxford, Raihan was based at the Australian National University, teaching courses on Islam, the Modern Middle East, Sunni-Shia relations, Gender and Culture in the Middle East, and Muslim Politics. She was the co-recipient of the 2018 Max Crawford Medal, awarded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities for ‘outstanding achievement in the humanities by an early-career scholar’. She also delivered the 8th Hancock Lecture for the Academy, titled “Hybrid Civilisation or the Clash of Civilisations: Rethinking the Muslim Other.”

From 2019 to 2022, Raihan was an Australian Research Council Fellow (DECRA). She was the Goldman Faculty Leave Fellow at Brandeis University for the 2022-2023 academic year. 

Raihan has been the co-convenor (2015-2018) and convenor (2019-2020) of the Political Islam seminar series for various Australian Commonwealth government agencies. She has also delivered consultancies for the Australian Attorney General’s Department and Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs.

She is a regular commentator in international media on Islam and Middle East politics. She shares her research expertise on various media outlets, and has given numerous interviews including on Voice of America, BBC World, BBC Arabic, ABC TV and ABC Radio National. She has appeared as a panellist on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Q&A program. In 2019, she was placed in the ABC’s Top 5 Media Residency Program for humanities scholars in Australia. 

She has written in academic and non-academic outlets including the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage publication. She is the author of Saudi Clerics and Shia Islam (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rethinking Salafism: The Transnational Networks of Salafi ‘Ulama in Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (Oxford University Press, 2021).
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She has a Bachelors Degree in Political Science, with a minor in Islamic Studies, and a Masters in International Relations from the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and a PhD from the ANU.
Dr. Farah Ahmed is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She co-convenes the Intercultural and Conflict-transformation Dialogue’ strand of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research group. Her current project is: Rethinking Islamic education for British Muslim children: a philosophical investigation of dialogue in Islamic educational theory and an empirical study trialling dialogic pedagogy in UK madrasahs (supplementary schools).
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Farah has published widely on Islamic education and is founder and Director of Education and Research at Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation, where she has worked for seventeen years on research driven curriculum development and teacher education for Muslim teachers.
Dr. Shamim Miah, is a senior lecturer and the author of four books: Ibn Khaldun: Education, History and Society (due 2023); Race, Space and Multiculturalism in Northern England (co author-2020); Muslims and the Question of Security: Trojan Horse, Prevent and Racial Politics (2017) and  Muslims Schooling and the Question of Self-Segregation which received the ‘highly commended’ book award by the Society for Educational Studies’ (2016). Shamim is the co-editor for Muslim's in Britain series (Oxford University Press).  He is also a senior fellow at the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies and an associate editor for the journal Critical Muslim (Hurst) .
Dr. Safaruk Chowdhury studied Philosophy at Kings College London, completing it with the accompanying Associate of Kings College (AKC) award. He then travelled to Cairo to study the traditional Islamic Studies curricula at al-Azhar University. He returned to the UK to complete his MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies with distinction. His doctoral dissertation was on the eminent Sufi hagiographer and theoretician Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021), published as A Sufi Apologist of Nishapur: The Life and Thought of Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2019). Chowdhury's research interests, in addition to Sufism at the moment, are in paraconsistent logic, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology, with a keen interest in how these subjects were articulated and discussed within the Islamic intellectual tradition - especially within kalam theology. His most recent books are entitled Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil (New York and Cairo: AUC Press, 2021), which is the first work in Islamic Studies to treat the topic within the analytic theology approach and A Treatise on Disputation and Argument: Risālat al-Ādāb Fī ʿIlm al-Baḥth wa’l-Munāẓara (London, Dar al-Nicosia, 2020). Chowdhury was the lead researcher on the project Beyond Foundationalism: New Horizons in Muslim Analytic Theology, funded under a John Templeton Foundation grant award in association with Cambridge Muslim College and Aziz Foundation. Chowdhury is a past lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and Birkbeck, University of London. He runs the Islamic Analytic Theology website, and his academic work can be found on his Academia.edu page. He is currently a lecturer and researcher at the Ibn Rushd Centre for Excellence and Research, a senior instructor at the Whitethread Institute and the Centre for Islamic Knowledge, and executive editor of the Journal of Islamic Philosophy.
Dr. Yakoob Ahmed is a graduate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he completed his Ph.D. in Late Ottoman history with a focus on Ottoman Constitutionalism and the role of the Ottoman ulema. He is currently a staff member at Istanbul University’s ilahiyat (theology) faculty, where he specializes in teaching Islamic history, Ottoman history, Islamic civilization and modern Islamic thought. Dr. Yakoob is a regular columnist for TRT World and also has guest-appeared in a host of podcasts and written for various academic and Muslim intellectual platforms. His interests include late Ottoman history, the history of nationalism and the nation-state in the Muslim world, collective memory construction, Islamic studies and Turkish politics.
Dr. Mohammad H. Fadel is Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.
Dr. Sohail Hanif works on Islamic legal theory, with a focus on the Ḥanafī school of law. He received a MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, A Theory of Early Classical Ḥanafism: Legal Epistemology in the Hidāyah of Burhān al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Abī Bakr al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), studies the interplay of rationality and tradition in a major work of legal commentary. Sohail has also spent over a decade in Jordan where he studied a full curriculum of Islamic sciences with traditional ‘ulamā’. He was previously Head of Arabic Sciences at Qasid Arabic institute in Amman, an instructor in Islamic studies at Qibla online academy, and has taught undergraduate classes on Modern Islam and Qur’anic studies at the University of Oxford. He has also served as Head of Research and Development at the National Zakat Foundation.
Dr. Waleed Kadous is Chief Scientist at Anyscale, the company behind the popular open source distributed computing platform Ray. He leads the company’s LLM efforts. Prior to Anyscale, Waleed worked at Uber, where he led overall system architecture, evangelized machine learning, and led the Location and Maps teams. He previously worked at Google, where he founded the Android Location and Sensing team, responsible for the “blue dot” as well as ML algorithms underlying products like Google Fit. He also holds more than 40 patents.
Professor Khairudin Aljunied is Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya. He received his BA and MA in History from the National University of Singapore in 2003 and completed his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, in 2008. Dr. Khairudin has studied and conducted research in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Dr. Khairudin has held a number of visiting positions. He was an Honorary Research Associate at La Trobe University, Australia, in 2012. In 2013, he was a Fulbright Professor at Columbia University. More recently, Dr. Khairudin was a Visiting Professor at the University of Brunei (2015). He was appointed as Full Professor and the Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at Georgetown University (2017-2018) and maintains a position as Senior Fellow. He has also been an associate professor at the National University of Singapore. A recognized specialist in the field of intellectual history, his research focuses on the connections between Southeast Asia and Global Islam. He is the author and editor of thirteen books and more than thirty internationally refereed articles. Recent publications include Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Hamka and Islam: Cosmopolitan Reform in the Malay World (Cornell University Press, 2018), Islam in Malaysia: An Entwined History (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Shapers of Islam in Southeast Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
Professor Issam Eido is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and a former Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Eido's research focuses on the Qur'an in late antiquity, Hadīth Studies, Sufism. His teaching interests focus on Arabic and Islamic Studies. Prior to the Syrian uprising, Eido served as a lecturer in the faculty of Islamic Studies in the Department of Qur'an and Hadīth Studies at the University of Damascus. His doctoral work, 'Early Hadīth Scholars and their Criteria of Hadīth Criticism,' presented a new understanding of the criteria used by Muslim scholars in accepting or rejecting traditions attributed to Muhammad and the transformations of that criteria from the classical to the modern period. While undertaking his doctoral work in the mid-2000s, Eido solidified an international reputation among Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies experts across disciplines by working closely with visiting researchers and Fulbright scholars in Damascus through and Arabic and Islamic studies institute he founded, named the Dalalah Institute. In 2012, he was a Fellow of the "Europe in the Middle East/Middle East in Europe" Research program at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin (affiliated with Corpus Coranicum). Currently, his research focuses on the question of authenticity and authoritative Islamic texts among Muslim scholars in the Islamic formative period.
Professor Aria Nakissa is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MA in Islamic Law from the International Islamic University Malaysia. His research focuses on law and religion in the Muslim world, and he has conducted extensive field research in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, using the Arabic and Malaysian/Indonesian languages. His research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Nakissa is author of the The Anthropology of Islamic Law: Education, Ethics, and Legal Interpretation at Egypt’s al-Azhar (Oxford, 2019). Nakissa’s research has also appeared in various journals, including the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Islamic Law and Society, and the Muslim World.

Nakissa is currently working on a book titled: “Human Rights, Counterterrorism, and Islamic Reform: A Global Anthropological History from the Colonial Period to the Present.” The book can be described briefly as follows. “Human rights”, “counterterrorism”, and “Islamic reform” are three overlapping projects central to a distinctive mode of liberal governance applied to Muslim populations. These projects emerged in the nineteenth century under the British, French, Dutch, and Russian Empires. Today they are implemented by a global network of institutions, including government agencies, NGOs, educational organizations, and social media corporations. The book traces the development of these projects from the colonial period until the present. The book has both significant historical and ethnographic components. The ethnographic component centers on a comparative analysis of three linked regions, namely, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Data on Southeast Asia will be drawn from long-term fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia. Data on the Middle East will be drawn from long-term fieldwork in Egypt and Morocco. Data on North America will be drawn from long-term fieldwork in the United States. Research for the book will be conducted in Arabic, Malaysian/Indonesian, English, French, and Dutch languages.
Professor Ahmed El Shamsy is Professor of Islamic Thought and the Department Chair at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law.

El Shamsy’s first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals  in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims.
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El Shamsy teaches courses and supervises student research on all aspects of classical Islamic thought. He is an associated (non-supervising) faculty member at the Divinity School.
Dr. Fella Lahmar is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA). She is a Research Associate at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). She worked as a Ph.D. supervisor at the University of Bolton and led both MA Islamic Studies and MEd Education programs at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, validated by Newman University, Birmingham. She also worked as a Research Associate on an international higher education project at the University of Nottingham. Prior to joining the Higher Education accredited sector, Fella gained ample experience as a lecturer and academic adviser at other non-accredited Islamic-based higher education institutions in the UK. Her teaching experience also involves teaching at Muslim schools, masjids, and other community organizations, including leading ‘Alimiyyah programs. 

Fella’s broader research interest explores intersections between philosophy of education, policy making in education, educational leadership, Islamic education, migration, and identity formation. She has published on Islamic educational theory and practice, including higher education. Her Ph.D. and follow-up research examines Islamic education in Western contexts. She is a guest co-editor for the peer-reviewed journal: Religions’ special issue on Islamic education in Western Contexts. 

In terms of education, Fella has a Ph.D. in education and an ESRC-recognized MA in Educational Research Methods, both obtained at the University of Nottingham, a PGCert in Higher Education Practice (Newman University); an MA in Islamic Studies (Loughborough University); a PGCert in Professional Studies in Education (Open University); and a BA in Islamic Studies (Emir Abdelkader Islamic University in Algeria).
Professor Salman Sayyid is a Professor at the University of Leeds, where he holds a Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought and is the Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy. He is also a Senior Research Associate at Al-Sharq Forum. Previously, Sayyid was a Professor and the inaugural director of the International Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding, in Australia. As the center’s director, Sayyid made a film entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Muslims But Were Afraid to Ask” and worked with the Australia Day Council to develop a schema for an annual national Award for Muslims and Non-Muslim Understanding. He has held academic positions in London, Manchester and Adelaide. Professor Sayyid is a political theorist, whose work engages with critical theory and the politics and culture of the Global South. Sayyid’s work is recognized for its innovative and transformative impact. His studies of political Islam, Islamophobia and racism, have been highly influential and translated into half a dozen languages. His areas of expertise are in Decolonial thought; poststructuralist political theory, critical Muslim studies; analysis of Islamophobia and racism and historical and relational macro-sociology. 

Some of his major publications include A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (Zed Book, 1997), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), Thinking Through Islamophobia (Columbia University Press, 2010), Racism, Governance, and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights (Routledge, 2013), Recalling The Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order (Hurst & Company, 2014) and Islamism as Philosophy: Decolonial Horizons (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).  Currently, Sayyid is leading a major inter-disciplinary research program based on a dialogue between decolonial thought and political theory. As part of this research agenda, Sayyid founded a new international peer-reviewed academic journal ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. He is a frequent contributor to national and international media.
Professor Recep Şentürk is the Dean of the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He was the former Founding President of Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul (2017–2021). Dr. Şentürk holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Sociology and specializes in Civilization Studies, Sociology, and Islamic Studies with a focus on social networks, human rights, and modernization in the Muslim world. 
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He served as a researcher at the Center for Islamic Studies (İSAM) in Istanbul, and as Founding Director of the Alliance of Civilizations Institute. He is Head of the International Ibn Khaldun Society, and has a seat on the editorial boards of multiple academic journals. Among his books are, in English: Narrative Social Structure: Hadith Transmission Network 610-1505; and in Turkish: Open Civilization: Towards a Multi- Civilizational Society and World; Ibn Khaldun: Contemporary Readings; Malcolm X: Struggle for Human Rights; and Social Memory: Hadith Transmission Network 610-1505. Dr. Şentürk’s work has been translated to Arabic, Japanese, and Spanish.
Professor Heba Raouf Ezzat is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute of Alliance of Civilizations at Ibn Haldun University (IHU) in Istanbul, Turkey. She also teaches at in the Departments of Political Science and Sociology at IHU. For nearly 30 years, she taught political theory at Cairo University. She was also an adjunct professor at the American University in Cairo (2006-2013). She spent two years (2014-2015) at the Civil Society and Human Security Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE) as a visiting fellow before moving to Istanbul – where she is currently based – in 2016. Her academic writings and teaching cover a wide range of topics, including classic and modern Western political thought, Islamic political theory, women and politics, global civil society, urban politics, cities and citizenships, and Middle East politics. Besides her teaching and writings, she co-established a Diploma for Public Policy and Child Rights 2010 that was a project funded by the European Commission and coordinated between four Arab and four European universities. For that effort, she was awarded the Prize for Outstanding Support of German-Egyptian Collaboration in Science and Innovation. Since 2015, Dr. Raouf Ezzat supervised and introduced the full translation of Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity series into Arabic. She also translated Ziauddin Sardar's book Mecca: The Sacred City to Arabic. Her latest work is a research paper on the "Project on the Future of Human Rights in the Arab world" titled, "The Human Rights Movement and the Islamist: The Paths of Convergence and Divergence" with the Arab Reform Initiative/Paris, and forthcoming chapter titled, "Re-imagining Egypt: The State of War" in a book titled, Contemporary Thought in the Middle East (Routledge 2021). Her current research is on the reconfigurations of space in the Egyptian urban planning and urban politics, and the recent rise of Egyptian Ultranationalism.
Dr. Safaruk Chowdhury studied Philosophy at Kings College London completing it with the accompanying Associate of Kings College (AKC) award. He then traveled to Cairo to study the traditional Islamic Studies curricula at al-Azhar University. He returned to the UK to complete his MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies with distinction. His doctoral dissertation was on the eminent Sufi hagiographer and theoretician Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (d. 412/1021) published as A Sufi Apologist of Nishapur: The Life and Thought of Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2019). Chowdhury's research interests, in addition to Sufism at the moment, are in paraconsistent logic, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology with keen interest in how these subjects were articulated and discussed within the Islamic intellectual tradition - especially within kalam theology. His most recent book is entitled Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil (New York and Cairo: AUC Press, 2021) which is the first work in Islamic Studies to treat the topic within the analytic theology approach. Chowdhury is currently lead researcher on the project Beyond Foundationalism: New Horizons in Muslim Analytic Theology funded under a John Templeton Foundation grant award in association with Cambridge Muslim College and Aziz Foundation. Chowdhury runs the Islamic Analytic Theology website and his academic work can be found on his Academia.edu page.
Dr. Usaama al-Azami is a Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, where he also completed his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He then earned an MA and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Alongside his university career, he also earned an ‘Alimiyyah from the Al-Salam Institute under the guidance of Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region and has received ijazāt (certificates of authorization) from several Muslim scholars, including Shaykhs Ahmad ‘Ali Lajpuri, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kattani, Yunus Jaunpuri, Muhammad Rabi,’ ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Turayri,’ Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, Muhammad Al Rashid, Nizam Ya’qubi, and Ziyad al-Tukla. 

Usaama is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political thought. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Hurst Publishers/Oxford University Press, 2021), looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His Ph.D., which is a separate project which he hopes to develop into a monograph in the near future, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late 20th to the Early 21st Centuries". In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism and the nation-state, selectively adopting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understanding of Islam. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present.

In addition to academic writing, he is an occasional commentator on public affairs pertaining to Muslims in outlets such as Middle East Eye, HuffPost, Muslim Matters, and TRT World.
Dr. Ramon Harvey is Aziz Foundation Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge Muslim College where he teaches Revealed Foundations on the BA in Islamic Studies. He received his MA and Ph.D. in Islamic studies from SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on Qur’anic studies, philosophical theology, and ethics, both studying the intellectual history of these disciplines and making his own contemporary interventions. Dr. Harvey’s first book, The Qur’an and the Just Society, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. His latest book is Transcendent God, Rational World: A Maturidi Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). It is a work of contemporary Muslim theology, drawing substantially on the Maturidi tradition (especially its eponym Abu Mansur al-Maturidi), as well as modern analytic and continental philosophy.

He is also a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies and the series editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology. Alongside his academic training, he has spent several years studying with traditionally trained Islamic scholars in the UK, has attended an intensive programme at Al-Azhar in Cairo, graduated from the Al-Salam Institute Islamic Scholarship Programme and was awarded the shahada al-‘alimiyya (Licence in Islamic Scholarship) under the supervision of Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi.
Dr. Yakoob Ahmed is a graduate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he completed his Ph.D. in Late Ottoman history with a focus on Ottoman Constitutionalism and the role of the Ottoman ulema. He is currently a staff member at Istanbul University’s ilahiyat (theology) faculty, where he specializes in teaching Islamic history, Ottoman history, Islamic civilization and modern Islamic thought. Dr. Yakoob is a regular columnist for TRT World and also has guest-appeared in a host of podcasts and written for various academic and Muslim intellectual platforms. His interests include late Ottoman history, the history of nationalism and the nation-state in the Muslim world, collective memory construction, Islamic studies and Turkish politics.
Professor Salman Sayyid is a Professor at the University of Leeds, where he holds a Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought and is the Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy. He is also a Senior Research Associate at Al-Sharq Forum. Previously, Sayyid was a Professor and the inaugural director of the International Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding, in Australia. As the center’s director, Sayyid made a film entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Muslims But Were Afraid to Ask” and worked with the Australia Day Council to develop a schema for an annual national Award for Muslims and Non-Muslim Understanding. He has held academic positions in London, Manchester and Adelaide. Professor Sayyid is a political theorist, whose work engages with critical theory and the politics and culture of the Global South. Sayyid’s work is recognized for its innovative and transformative impact. His studies of political Islam, Islamophobia and racism, have been highly influential and translated into half a dozen languages. His areas of expertise are in Decolonial thought; poststructuralist political theory, critical Muslim studies; analysis of Islamophobia and racism and historical and relational macro-sociology. 

Some of his major publications include A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (Zed Book, 1997), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), Thinking Through Islamophobia (Columbia University Press, 2010), Racism, Governance, and Public Policy: Beyond Human Rights (Routledge, 2013), Recalling The Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order (Hurst & Company, 2014) and Islamism as Philosophy: Decolonial Horizons (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).  Currently, Sayyid is leading a major inter-disciplinary research program based on a dialogue between decolonial thought and political theory. As part of this research agenda, Sayyid founded a new international peer-reviewed academic journal ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. He is a frequent contributor to national and international media.
Professor Emad Hamdeh is an Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Embry Riddle University. He has published several articles on contemporary Muslim reform movements and Islamic law. He is also the author of The Necessity of Hadith in Islam (International Islamic Publishing House, 2011) and Salafism and Traditionalism: Scholarly Authority in Modern Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He holds a Ph.D. and MPhil in Theology from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) and an M.A. in Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations from Hartford Seminary (United States).
Professor Jasser Auda is a scholar of Islam, whose scholarship has focused on an objective-based approach to the understanding of the Qurʾān and Prophetic traditions. He is currently the President of Maqasid Institute, an international network of research centres and educational projects, a Professor and Al-Shatibi Chair of Maqāṣid Studies at the International Peace College in South Africa and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemporary Maqāṣid Studies. He is a Member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, Fiqh Council of North America and the International Union of Muslims Scholars.

He holds a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Islamic Law from the University of Wales (UK), a Ph.D. in Systems Analysis from the University of Waterloo (Canada), and an M. Jur. thesis on the Maqāṣid of the Sharīʿah from the Islamic American University (United States). Early in his life, he memorized the Qurʾān and undertook traditional studies at the Study Circles of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Egypt, where he learned from a number of distinguished scholars of Qurʾān, Usūl and Ḥadīth.

Previously, he worked as a professor at the universities of Waterloo, Ryerson and Carleton in Canada, Alexandria University in Egypt, Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar, the American University of Sharjah in UAE, and the University of Brunei Darussalam in Brunei. He was also a Founding Director of Al-Maqasid Research Center at Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, UK; a Founding Deputy Director of the Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, Qatar; and a Fellow of the Islamic Fiqh Academy, India.  Professor Auda has lectured on Islam in many countries across the world and has authored 25 books in Arabic and English, including the best-selling Maqasid Al-Shariah: A Beginners Guide, which has been translated into 30 languages. 
Professor Abdullah al-Ahsan is a professor of comparative civilization studies. He most recently taught at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Şehir University and the Department of History and Civilization at the International Islamic University Malaysia. Dr. Ahsan holds an MA in Islamic Studies from McGill University and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan. He has contributed many articles on the relationship between contemporary Islamic and Western civilizations. His works include The Organization of the Islamic Conference: Introduction to an Islamic Political Institution (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1988) and Ummah or Nation: Identity Crisis in Contemporary Muslim Society (Islamic Foundation, 1992). He has edited, along with Stephen B Young, Guidance for Good Governance: Explorations in Qur'anic, Scientific, and Cross-cultural Approaches (International Islamic University Malaysia, 2008 and 2013). His latest edited book, Qur'anic Guidance for Good Governance: A Contemporary Perspective (2017), was published by Palgrave Macmillan. His books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Turkish, and Urdu.
Professor Joseph J. Kaminski is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at the International University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His current research interests include Religion and Politics, Comparative Political Theory, and New Approaches to Islamic Public Reason. His books include Islam, Liberalism, and Ontology: A Critical Re-evaluation (Routledge, 2021) and The Contemporary Islamic Governed State: A Reconceptualization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is a graduate of Rutgers University, City University of New York (CUNY) and Purdue University where he completed his Ph.D. 
​Dr. Usaama al-Azami is a Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, where he also completed his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He then earned an MA and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

Alongside his university career, he also earned an ‘Alimiyyah from the Al-Salam Institute under the guidance of Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi. He has travelled extensively throughout the Middle East, living for five years in the region and has received ijazāt (certificates of authorization) from several Muslim scholars, including Shaykhs Ahmad ‘Ali Lajpuri, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kattani, Yunus Jaunpuri, Muhammad Rabi,’ ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Turayri,’ Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, Muhammad Al Rashid, Nizam Ya’qubi, and Ziyad al-Tukla. 

Usaama is primarily interested in the interaction between Islam and modernity with a special interest in modern developments in Islamic political thought. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Hurst Publishers/Oxford University Press, 2021), looks at the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. His Ph.D., which is a separate project which he hopes to develop into a monograph in the near future, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late 20th to the Early 21st Centuries". In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism and the nation-state, selectively adopting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understanding of Islam. His broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam down to the present.

In addition to academic writing, he is an occasional commentator on public affairs pertaining to Muslims in outlets such as Middle East Eye, HuffPost, Muslim Matters, and TRT World.
Professor Ovamir Anjum is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics and law in classical and medieval Islam, with comparative interest in Western Thought. His interests are united by a common theoretical focus on epistemology or views of intellect/reason in various domains of Islamic thought, ranging from politics (siyasa), law (fiqh), theology (kalam), falsafa (Islamic philosophy) and spirituality (Sufism, mysticism, and asceticism). He brings this historical studies to bear on issues in contemporary Islamic thought and movements and is currently researching developments in Islamic political thought in the wake of the Arab Uprisings of 2011. While trained as an historian, his work is essentially interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology. 
 
He obtained his Ph.D. in Islamic Intellectual history in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before higher education, his Islamic training began at home while growing up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States with a broad range of scholars including his remarkable grandmother, and continued as he studied fiqh with South Asian Ḥanafī and Ahl-e-hadīs scholars and usūl al-fiqh and qirā’āt of the Quran with scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar and Syria. He is the author of  Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has translated Madarij al-Salikin (Ranks of Divine Seekers, Brill 2020) by Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1351), one of the greatest Islamic spiritual classics, which upon completion will be the largest single-author English translation of an Arabic text. His current projects include a survey of Islamic history and a monograph on Islamic political thought. Dr. Ovamir is the Founder of the Ummatics Colloquium, the Editor of the American Journal of Islam and Society and the Editor-in-Chief of the Editorial Review Board at the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.
​​Dr. Ermin Sinanović is executive director of the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World (CICW) at Shenandoah University, where he is also Scholar in Residence. Before joining CICW, he was director of research and academic programs at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). He was also a faculty associate in research, Southeast Asian Program at Cornell University.

Sinanović studied for a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He obtained two bachelor's degrees (one in the Qur’an and Sunnah studies, the other in political science) from the International Islamic University Malaysia, and a master's degree in Islamic civilization from the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Sinanović’s research interests include transnational Islamic revival, revival and reform in Islam, Islamic political thought, Southeast Asian politics, Islam and politics, and leadership in higher education. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and in edited volumes, including Politics, Religion and Ideology, Muslim-Christian Relations, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World. 

Sinanović sits on editorial boards of two academic journals: Politics, Religion and Ideology (Taylor & Francis) and Context (Center for Advanced Studies, Sarajevo). He has reviewed book manuscripts and articles for Edinburgh University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan USA, American Political Science Review, Journal of Global Ethics, and Journal of Muslims in Europe, among others.
Dr. Katherine Bullock is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where she also completed her Ph.D. Her teaching focus is political Islam from a global perspective, and her research focuses on Muslims in Canada, their history, contemporary lived experiences, political and civic engagement, debates on the veil, and media representations of Islam and Muslims.  She was the editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences from 2003 – 2008 and the Vice-President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America from 2006 - 2009.
 
Her publications include Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves (University of Texas Press) and Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes (International Institute of Islamic Thought), which has been translated into Arabic, French, and Turkish. She is also the Director of Research of the Tessellate Institute, a research institute that explores and documents the lived experiences of Muslims in Canada and the President of Compass Books, dedicated to publishing top-quality books about Islam and Muslims in English. Originally from Australia, she lives in Oakville with her husband and children. She embraced Islam in 1994.
Professor Ovamir Anjum is Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo. His work focuses on the nexus of theology, ethics, politics and law in classical and medieval Islam, with comparative interest in Western Thought. His interests are united by a common theoretical focus on epistemology or views of intellect/reason in various domains of Islamic thought, ranging from politics (siyasa), law (fiqh), theology (kalam), falsafa (Islamic philosophy) and spirituality (Sufism, mysticism, and asceticism). He brings this historical studies to bear on issues in contemporary Islamic thought and movements and is currently researching developments in Islamic political thought in the wake of the Arab Uprisings of 2011. While trained as an historian, his work is essentially interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of classical Islamic studies, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology. 
 
He obtained his Ph.D. in Islamic Intellectual history in the Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Masters in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelors in Nuclear Engineering and Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before higher education, his Islamic training began at home while growing up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States with a broad range of scholars including his remarkable grandmother, and continued as he studied fiqh with South Asian Ḥanafī and Ahl-e-hadīs scholars and usūl al-fiqh and qirā’āt of the Qurʾān with scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar and Syria. He is the author of Politics, Law and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has translated Madarij al-Salikin (Ranks of Divine Seekers, Brill 2020) by Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1351), one of the greatest Islamic spiritual classics, which upon completion will be the largest single-author English translation of an Arabic text. His current projects include a survey of Islamic history and a monograph on Islamic political thought. 

​Dr. Ovamir is the Founder of the Ummatics Institute, the Editor of the American Journal of Islam and Society and the Editor-in-Chief of the Editorial Review Board at the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.
Professor Mohammad H. Fadel is Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.
Dr. Muzaffar Iqbal is the founder-president of the Center for Islamic Sciences, (previously, Center for Islam and Science) and General Editor of the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, the first English-language reference work on the Qur'an based on fourteen centuries of Muslim scholarship.
 
Dr. Iqbal has held academic and research positions at University of Saskatchewan (1979-1984), University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-85), and McGill University (1986). During 1990-1996, he worked as Director Scientific Information, Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (COMSTECH). He was Director of Pakistan Academy of Sciences during 1997-98. In 1999, Dr. Iqbal became the Program Director for the Muslim World for the Science-Religion Course Program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), Berkeley, USA, a position he held until the end of the Program in 2001.

Dr. Iqbal has written, translated, and edited twenty-one books and published nearly one hundred papers on various aspects of Islam, its spiritual and intellectual traditions and on the relationship between Islam and science, and Islam and the West. He co-translated, with Dr. Zafar Ishaq Ansari, Volume VII of Tafhim al-Qur’an (Islamic Foundation, 2001). He contributed, as consultant, to Concentric Circles—Nurturing Awe and Wonder in Early Childhood and is one of the founders of Muslim Education Foundation (Canada), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing resources and services to educators, students and parents for a process of learning built on the Qur’anic worldview.

He is the founding editor of the Islam & Science (renamed as Journal of Islamic Sciences in 2013), a journal that explores, from Islamic perspectives, religious and philosophical implications of data and theories originating in the physical, biological, and social sciences. He is also the Series Editor for Ashgate's Islam and Science: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives (2012, reprinted by Routledge), a four volume work that brings together the most important and influential articles dealing with various aspects of the relationship between Islam and science.

His other publications include:
​For a more detailed list of publications, see publications.
Professor Mohammad H. Fadel is Professor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago and received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Professor Fadel was admitted to the Bar of New York in 2000 and practiced law with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, New York, where he worked on a wide variety of corporate finance transactions and securities-related regulatory investigations. Professor Fadel also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and the Honorable Anthony A. Alaimo of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.