Research clusters

Islamic Studies

The IAIS, with its international track record of research, boasts six Islamic Studies specialists, making us the largest Islamic Studies centre in the UK. Islamic Studies benefits, as do the other 'clusters', from the Institute's excellent resources for supervising postgraduate research. We are particularly strong in the study of the pre-modern Islamic world and its intellectual history.

Yet the Islamic Studies cluster also interacts with several social scientists in the IAIS - especially with regard to the study of Islam in Europe, and Islamist movements - and with the Persian Studies Group. A new initiative from 2008-9 is the establishment of a Centre for the Study of Islamic Philosophy that will coordinate research activities in areas of Islamic intellectual traditions.

Beyond our research and supervision, staff are engaged in policy and expert advice to stakeholders in Islamic studies in the public and private sector, in recent times particularly on issues of radicalisation and counter-terrorism.

Postgraduate programmes

• MA in Islamic Studies
• MPhil/PhD in Islamic Studies

Core staff in Islamic Studies

Professor Robert Gleave (BA York, PhD Manchester) is Professor of Arabic Studies. He has strong research interests in Islamic Law, in particular the development of Twelver Shi'i legal thought; relationship between theory and practice in Islamic Law, medieval and modern Islamic political theory and the legitimisation of violence in Muslim legal works. He is the author of Inevitable Doubt: Two Theories of Shi'i Jurisprudence (Brill, 2000) and Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari School of Imami Shi'ism (Brill, 2007), editor of Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), and co-editor of Studies in Islamic Law: A Festschrift for Colin Imber (OUP, 2008).

Professor Ian Netton (BA SOAS, PhD Exon) is the Sharjah Chair of Islamic Studies. His primary research interests are Islamic theology and philosophy, Sufism, mediaeval Arab travellers, Arabic and Islamic bibliography, comparative textuality and semiotics, comparative religion and general Islamic Studies. He has examined over 90 doctoral dissertations. He is the author or editor of eighteen books of which the most recent are Islam, Christianity and Tradition: A Comparative Exploration (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and editor Islamic Philosophy and Theology (4 vols., Routledge, 2007). Professor Netton is also the General Editor of The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and serves on several national committees as, for example, Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Panel 8 (Philosophy, Religious Studies and Law), and as a Sub-Panellist in his field for the Research Assessment Exercise of 2008.

Professor Dionisius Agius (PhD Toronto) holds the Chair in Arabic and Islamic Material Culture. He is best known for his work on Islamic material culture, maritime ethnography and Arabic language and linguistics. He is partTuesday, 21 September, 2010 ships, the people who built and sailed on them, resources and trade in the Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean. He has been awarded a major prize for Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow (Kegan Paul Ltd., 2005) by the Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah Foundation and the British-Kuwait Friendship Society for the best scholarly work on the Middle East published in the UK in 2005. His most recent work, the final part of his trilogy on ships and seafaring, is Classic Ships of Islam (Brill, 2008).

Dr Leonard Lewisohn (PhD SOAS) is the Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow and Lecturer in Classical Persian and Sufi Literature. A specialist on classical Persian Sufism and the translation of its key texts, he is the author of Beyond Faith and Infidelity: The Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari (Curzon, 1995) and editor of The Heritage of Sufism (3 vols, Oneworld, 1999), The Art of Spiritual Flight: Farid al-Din 'Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition, ed. with C. Shackle (I.B. Tauris, 2006), and An Anthology of Esoteric Traditions in Islam (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).

Dr Sajjad Rizvi (BA MPhil Oxon, PhD Cantab) is Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies. He is the Director of the MA in Islamic Studies. His main research interest is in the role of philosophy in Islamic culture and civilisation and its relationship with the other Islamic 'humanities' and disciplines, especially mystical thought and theology. He has published a number of articles in the areas of Islamic philosophy, Shi'ism and Qur'anic Studies. He is the author of Mulla Sadra Shirazi: Life, Works and Sources (JSS Supplements 18, Oxford University Press, 2007), with Feras Hamza, Understanding the Word of God: An Anthology of Qur'anic Commentaries (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2008), and Mulla Sadra on the One and the Many (Routledge, forthcoming 2008). He is currently completing an introduction and reader to Mulla Sadra and the Safavid Philosophical Traditions (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2009), a short monograph on Mir Damad (Oneworld, forthcoming 2010), and has a project to study the transmission of Islamic philosophical traditions from Iran to India between the 15th and 19th centuries.

Dr Suha Taji-Farouki (BA Durham, PhD Exon) is Senior Lecturer in Modern Islam. Teaching and research interests include modern Islamic history, intellectual trends and debates; contemporary Islam and politics; modern Sufism and salafiyya; Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish relations; and Muslims in the West. She has published A Fundamental Quest: Hizb al-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate (Grey Seal, 1996), edited Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century, with B Nafi (Tauris 2004). Her most recent publication is Sufi Spirituality in the Contemporary West: Beshara and the Legacy of Ibn 'Arabi (Anqa Publishing, 2007).

A number of other faculty at the IAIS and in the department of Politics specialise in areas at the intersection of Islamic Studies with contemporary social and political issues in the Muslim world: Prof. Tim Niblock, Prof. Gareth Stanfield, Dr Manuela Giolfo, Dr Lise Storm and Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer all in the IAIS, and, in the Department of Politics, Prof. Michael Dumper and Dr Larbi Sadiki.