Professor Melchert here reviews various attempts to characterize the geography of hadith transmission in the early centuries. Case studies are Sufyān al-Thawrī (Kufan, d. 161/777?), Saʿīd ibn Jubayr (Kufan, d. 95/714?), al-Awzāʿī (Syrian, d. 157/773-4?), Ibn al-Mubārak (Khurasani, d. 181/797),…

National identity and liberal democracy are recurrent themes in debates about Muslim minorities in the West. Britain is no exception to this, with British politicians responding to public claims about Muslims’ integration in the UK by mandating the promotion of ‘fundamental British values’ such as…

In Money, Markets, and Monarchies (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Adam Hanieh examines how the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are powerfully shaping the political economy of the wider Middle East. Focusing on sectors such as agribusiness, real estate, finance, retail,…

When premodern Arab historians reconstructed the Islamic past, which criteria governed their use of previously-written sources? Was their worldview shaped by sectarian concerns, or did they value knowledge of all kinds for its own sake? In this talk, we will explore the wide-ranging archival…

How can we explain the impact of the Arab uprisings on Islamist movements in the region? Most of the focus has been on the ascent of radical violent groups like ISIS, or the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. But Tunisia’s Ennahda movement presents an alternative trajectory. Here is an…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is frequently accused by the western media, and in scholarly and foreign policy writings, of being responsible for the spread of a radical form of political Islam, commonly labelled Salafism.  This talk will address the history of the Kingdom’s relationship with…

In this talk, Dr Chaudhary will discuss three key issues in the development of AI and digital technologies and why they should be of interest from the perspective of Islamic scholarship. He will discuss the digitalisation of space and time. Next he will discuss how interacting with an AI agent is…

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 950) is one the most celebrated philosophers in world history. Hailing from Central Asia, he lived and travelled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, leaving virtually no field of knowledge in his day untouched.