Shahab Ahmed

Fall Term 2012

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Legal Studies

Research Interests

• Islamic Intellectual and Cultural History
• Relationship between Islamic Law and other Islamic Discourses
• Truth and Authority
• Comparative Ethics and Poetics

Education

• American University in Cairo B.A. 1993, Middle East History
• Princeton University Ph.D. 1999, Near Eastern Studies

Appointments

• Assistant Professor of Classical Arabic Literature, American University in Cairo
• Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows
• Visiting Research Scholar in Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University
• Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Visiting Scholar, Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad
• Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard University
• The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Associate Professor of Islamic Legal Studies, 2012

Additional Information

Professor Ahmed will teach the course Orthodoxy: Truth, Authority, Law and the seminar The Social and Cultural Lives of Islamic Law in the Fall term 2012.

Biographical Statement

Shahab Ahmed is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on the Study of Religion. He received his primary schooling in Singapore, his secondary schooling in the UK, and attended university in Malaysia, Egypt and the USA. He first came to Harvard in 2000 as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and was subsequently appointed to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2005. He has just completed a monograph entitled What is Islam? An Essay on the Importance of Being Islamic (an attempt at conceptualizing Islam as a theoretical object and analytical category). He is currently working on two other books, Neither Paradise Nor Hellfire: Rethinking Islam through Ottoman Culture/Rethinking Ottoman Culture through Islam (about the nature of normative Islam in seventeenth-century Ottoman society; co-authored with Nenad Filipovic), and The Problem of the Satanic Verses and the Formation of Islamic Orthodoxy (a history of the attitudes of Muslims towards the Satanic verses incident from the seventh century down to the present day).

Representative Publications

• Ahmed, Shahab & Nenad Filipovic. "The Sultan's Syllabus: A Curriculum for the Ottoman Imperial medreses prescribed in a ferman of Qanuni I Suleyman, dated 973 (1566)," 98/99 Studia Islamica 183 (2004).
  
• Ahmed, Shahab. "Hadith (i. A General Introduction)" in Encyclopaedia Iranica Vol. 9.4, 442 (Ehsan Yarshater ed., Routledge and Kegan Paul, continued by Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1982-ongoing, 1999).
  
• Ahmed, Shahab. "Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic verses," 87 Studia Islamica 67 (1998).