Notes on Contributors
Binyamin Abrahamov
is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Theology and Mysticism and Quranic Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He was the head of the Department of Arabic and the dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He has published books and articles on early Islamic theology, al-Ghazālī, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and traditionalism and rationalism in Islam.
Frederick Colby
specializes in narratives on the Prophet Muḥammad’s night journey (isrāʾ) and ascension (miʿrāj). His monographs include Narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey: Tracing the Development of the Ibn ʿAbbās Ascension Discourse (SUNY, 2008) and a forthcoming work examining mystical ascensions in medieval al-Andalus. He edited and translated The Subtleties of the Ascension, a collection of early Sufi sayings on the subject by Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (Fons Vitae, 2006). He is co-editor of a collection of interdisciplinary essays about isrāʾ and miʿrāj narratives entitled The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-cultural Encounters with the Islamic Miʿrāj Tales (Indiana University Press, 2009).
Michael Ebstein
teaches at the Arabic Language and Literature Department and at the Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specialises in the study of classical Islamic mysticism, and has recently been working with colleagues from Jewish studies on the links between Islamic mysticism in al-Andalus and Jewish Kabbalah in its formative period.
Noah Gardiner
is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. His research is on Sufism, manuscript culture, and the occult sciences in the late medieval Arabic-speaking Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in the emergence and spread of the science of letters and names (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ), aka “lettrism,” in that period. He is co-editor of the Arabica special issue “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives” (Arabica 64, no. 3–4, 2017), and the author of numerous articles on Aḥmad al-Būnī and other medieval lettrist thinkers, and of the monograph Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in al-Muqaddimah (EB-Verlag Berlin, 2020).
Stephen Hirtenstein
is a senior editor of Encyclopaedia Islamica (Institute of Ismaili Studies, London), and tutor at the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He is editor of the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society (JMIAS), and director of Anqa Publishing. He also heads the MIAS Archiving Project, which is compiling a database and digital archive of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s historic manuscripts. His books include a biography of Ibn al-ʿArabī, The Unlimited Mercifier (Anqa Publishing, 1999), and translations of the latter’s work, The Seven Days of the Heart (Anqa Publishing, 2000), and The Alchemy of Human Happiness (Anqa Publishing, 2017).
Leah Kinberg
teaches at the Department of History of the Middle East and Africa, Tel Aviv University. Her academic interests include the function of dreams in classical Islam, the concept of death in Islamic popular eschatology, Qurʾān and ḥadīth as a means of legitimation, the question of Jerusalem in Islam, Islam and gender, and Qurʾānic and post-Qurʾānic literature in the service of contemporary political and religious rhetoric.
Alexander Knysh
is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan and director of an Islamic studies academic and educational program sponsored by the Rectorate of the St. Petersburg State University, Russia. His academic interests include Sufism, Qurʾānic studies, Muslim theological, philosophical, and juridical thought, and modern Islamic movements in comparative perspective. He has authored numerous publications on these subjects, including twelve books and several edited volumes. Knysh serves as sectional editor for “Sufism” of the Encyclopedia of Islam, Third Edition (Brill) and as executive editor of the Brill Handbooks of Islamic Mysticism book series.
Christian Lange
is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University, a member of the Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and director of the Netherlands Interuniversity School of Islamic Studies (NISIS). His research interests centre on premodern Arabic and Persian religious thought and practice, with a special emphasis on Islamic eschatology, penal law, and embodied piety in a broad sense. His publications include Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and, as editor, Locating Hell in Islamic Traditions (Brill, 2016).
Pierre Lory
studied Arabic and Islamic studies in Paris, specialising in mysticism and esoteric thought in medieval Islam. He holds a PhD from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (1981), and a state doctorate (habilitation, 1991). Since 1991, he has served as professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His main publications include La science des lettres en islam (Dervy-Livres, 2004), Le rêve et ses interprétations en Islam (Albin Michel, 2003), Alchimie et mystique en terre d’Islam (Verdier, 1989), Les commentaires ésotériques du Coran selon ‘Abd al-Razzâq al-Qâshânî (Deux Oceans, 1991) and La dignité de l’homme face aux anges, aux animaux et aux djinns (Albin Michel, 2018).
Munjed M. Murad
is the Johnson-Fry Assistant Professor of World Religions and Intercultural Studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. He defended his doctoral dissertation in comparative religion and in religion and ecology at Harvard Divinity School. He also holds a master’s degree from Yale School of the Environment.
Simon O’Meara
is Senior Lecturer in the History of Architecture and Archaeology of the Islamic Middle East at SOAS, University of London. He is an architectural historian of early to premodern urban Islamic culture, with a methodological interest in using the discourses of Islam to explore Islamic visuality.
Sara Sviri
is Professor Emerita at the Department of Arabic and the Department of Comparative Religions at HUJI. She has also taught at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, and at the University of Oxford. Fields of study include Islamic mysticism, in particular the formative period, and mystical philosophy, especially that of Ibn al-ʿArabī. Many of her academic articles on these topics can be viewed on www.academia.edu. Her book publications include The Taste of Hidden Things (The Golden Sufi Center, 1997), Sufi Anthology (Tel Aviv University, 2008 [in Hebrew], Al-Kamel Verlag, 2016 [in Arabic]), and Perspectives on Early Islamic Mysticism (Routledge, 2020).
Mathieu Terrier
is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and research associate at Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) University, Paris. He holds a PhD in religious studies from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE)/La Sorbonne, Paris. His research deals mainly with the relationship between Shīʿī Islam, philosophy, and Sufism, especially in fourteenth-to-seventeenth-century Iran. He has written numerous articles for academic journals and is the author of Histoire de la sagesse et philosophie shiʿite. L’Aimé des cœurs de Quṭb al-Dīn Ashkevarī (CERF, 2016); he is also the co-editor, with Denis Hermann, of Shiʿi Islam and Sufism: Classical Views and Modern Perspectives (I. B. Tauris, 2020).
Jean-Jacques Thibon
is Professor of Islamic Studies at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) in Paris. He has published a monograph entitled L’œuvre d’Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (IFPO, 2009) and translated into French one of al-Sulamī’s major works, the Ṭabaqāt al-ṣūfiyya, under the title Les générations des soufis (Brill, 2019). He is author of numerous other studies of medieval Sufis and Sufism, focusing more particularly on the different schools of spirituality, their representatives and their technical lexicon.
Richard Todd
has taught classical Arabic literature and Islamic cultural history at Durham University, the American University of Sharjah, and the University of Edinburgh since completing his PhD at the University of Oxford. In 2017, he joined the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, where he teaches Islamic philosophy. He is the author of The Sufi Doctrine of Man: Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s Metaphysical Anthropology (Brill, 2014) and co-edits the Taylor & Francis journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.
Saeko Yazaki
is Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow. She was previously the Outreach and Project Manager at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include Sufism, Muslim- Jewish relations in al-Andalus and their continuing and contemporary relevance, Japanese traditions including the dress of Shinto deities, and a comparative study of Sufism and Zen. Her current book projects include comparative mysticism and Sufism and Zen in the West. She is Chair of the BRAIS (British Association for Islamic Studies), De Gruyter Prize Committee, a research fellow at the Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University, and a section editor of the Journal of Open Theology (Islam; Eastern Religions).