Notes on Contributors
Camilla Adang (PhD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) is Professor of Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her main fields of research are the history of Islamic thought in al-Andalus, the Ẓāhirī school in the Islamic West in general, and the legal, theological and political thought of Ibn Ḥazm of Cordoba in particular. Another research focus is social and intellectual encounters between Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages and the Ottoman period. She is the author of Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill, 1996) and, with Sabine Schmidtke, Muslim Perceptions and Receptions of the Bible: Texts and Studies (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2019). She also co-edited several volumes, among them Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Perspective on Takfir (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Her most recent publications analyse a series of texts from the fatwā collection of the fifteenth century Moroccan scholar al-Wansharīsī.
Monique Bernards is a fulltime independent scholar at the Institute for Advanced Arabic and Islamic Studies (Antwerp, Belgium), Secretary of the School of Abbasid Studies and Executive Editor of the Journal of Abbasid Studies. She is a specialist in the intellectual and social history of the early and classical periods of Islam and, more specifically, in the history of the development of Arabic grammatical theories.
Her publications include Changing Traditions: Al-Mubarrad’s Refutation of Sībawayh and the Subsequent Reception of the Kitāb (Leiden: Brill, 1997) and, more recently, “Pioneers of Arabic Linguistic Studies,” in In the Shadow of Arabic, ed. Bilal Orfali (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 197–220; “Grammarians’ Circles of Learning: A Social Network Analysis,” in Abbasid Studies II, ed. John Nawas (Louvain: Peeters, 2010), 143–164.
Léon Buskens is Professor of Law and Culture in Muslim Societies at Leiden University and director of The Netherlands Institute in Morocco (NIMAR) in Rabat, Morocco. He studied anthropology, Modern Standard and Moroccan Arabic, and Islam, at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where he specialised in historical and Mediterranean anthropology. He did fieldwork and library research in Morocco on Islamic law and family relations, which resulted in a Ph.D. thesis defended in 1993 at the Faculty of Law of Leiden University.
One of his main research interests is how Muslims shape Islam in everyday life, in relation to other practices and to religious teachings. He has a longstanding interest in Morocco, and has more recently also started to do some research in Indonesia (focusing on Maluku and Papua) for comparative purposes.
Ahmed El Shamsy (PhD, Harvard) is Associate Professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), as well as numerous articles on various aspects of Islamic intellectual history.
Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Centre of Human and Social Sciences at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC-Spain). She has worked and published on the political, religious and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, on Islamic law, on the construction of orthodoxy and on violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources. Among her publications are: Abd al-Rahman III: The First Cordoban Caliph (London: Oneworld, 2005), The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2012) and Knowledge, Heresy and Politics in the Medieval Islamic West (forthcoming). She is the editor of volume 2: The Western Islamic World, Eleventh-Eighteenth Centuries of the The New Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Islam: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013) and the Routledge Handbook on al-Andalus (forthcoming). She has co-edited The Legal Status of D̲immī-s in the Islamic West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) and Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Perspective on Takfir (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
Aisha Geissinger PhD (2008) in Religious Studies, University of Toronto, is an Associate Professor at Carleton University (Canada). Geissinger’s research is located at the intersection of the study of the Qurʾān and its exegesis, the hadith literature, and gender. Recent publications include: Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qurʾān Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2015); “ ‘Are Men the Majority in Paradise, or Women?’: Constructing Gender and Communal Boundaries in Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj’s (d. 261/875) Kitāb al-Janna,” in Roads to Paradise: Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam, eds. Sebastian Günther and Todd Lawson (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 309–340; “No, a Woman Did Not ‘Edit the Quran’: Towards a Methodologically Coherent Approach to a Tradition Portraying a Woman and Written Quranic Materials,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 85, (2017): 416–445.
Geert Jan van Gelder (b. Amsterdam, 1947) studied Semitic Languages at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden. He was Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Groningen (1975–1998) and Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford (1998–2012). He is a Member of the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), a Fellow of the British Academy, an emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and an Honorary Member of the American Oriental Society. He has published widely on Classical Arabic literature; his books include Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden: Brill, 1982); The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes Towards Invective Poetry (Hijāʾ) in Classical Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Of Dishes and Discourse: Classical Arabic Literary Representations of Food (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000); Close Relationships: Incest and Inbreeding in Classical Arabic Literature (London and New York: IB Tauris, 2005); Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2013); Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology, selected and translated (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013); and, with Gregor Schoeler, an edition and translation of Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risālat al-Ghufrān), or, A Pardon to Enter the Garden (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013–2014).
Claude Gilliot (b. Guemps, Northern France 1940) studied philosophy and theology at the Studium of the Dominicans, Le Saulchoir, Etiolles. He studied Arabic and taught philosophy and religion in Lebanon (1969–1976). From 1989 until 2008 he was Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Université d’ Aix-Marseille and IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence. He is the author of Exégèse, langue et théologie en islam: l’ exégèse coranique de Tabari (Paris: J. Vrin, 1990), editor of Education and Learning in the Early Islamic World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) and co-editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, (Leiden: Brill, 2001–2006). More recent publications include “Mohammed’s Exegetical Activity in the Meccan Arabic Lectionary,” in The Coming of the Comforter: When, Where, and to Whom?, eds. Carlos Andrés Segovia, et al., Studies on the Rise of Islam and Various Other Topics in Memory of John Wansbrough (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012), 399–425, “Mujāhid’s Exegesis: Origins, Path of Transmission and Development of a Meccan Exegetical Tradition in its Human, Spiritual and Theological Environment,” in Tafsīr and Islamic Intellectual History: Exploring the Boundaries of a Genre, eds. Andreas Görke and Johanna Pink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 63–111, and “The Use of Lexicography in the Great Qurʾānic Commentary of al-Wāḥidī (d. 468/1076),” in The Meaning of the Word, ed. Stephen R. Burge, Lexicography and Qurʾānic Exegesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 119–156.
Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies and Principal Investigator on the Understanding Sharia and Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shiʿite Islam projects. He is a member of the Centre for the Study of Islam (CSI), and was its director from 2011 until 2018. His research interests include hermeneutics and scriptural exegesis in Islam; Islamic Law, in particular works of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh); violence and its justification in Islamic thought; Shiʿism, in particular Shiʿi legal and political theory. He is the author of Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning and Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Asma Hilali is Associate Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Lille, France. She gained her PhD from l’ École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. She has worked in various research centres in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Her main interest is related to the transmission of religious literature in early and mediaeval Islam and the issues of how these texts were used and what impact this use had on their forms and contents. Her recent publications include The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of The Qurʾan in The First Centuries AH (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); co-authored with Jacqueline Sublet, “The Masters’ Repertoire (mashyakha) and the Quest for Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam: Religious Learning between Continuity and Change, ed. Sebastian Günther (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
Michael Lecker is Professor (since 2000) at the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His recent articles include “The Monotheistic Cousins of Muḥammad’s Wife Khadīja” Der Islam 94 (2017): 363–384 and “Were there Female Relatives of the Prophet Muḥammad among the Besieged Qurayẓa?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 136 (2016): 397–404. He currently attempts to redefine Madīnat Rasūl Allāh and studies the Medinan trade on the eve of Islam.
Scott Lucas is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2002. He has published numerous articles and a book on Sunni hadith, law, and tafsīr. In 2017, The Islamic Texts Society published Lucas’s unabridged translation of thirty passages from al-Tabari’s Qurʾān commentary in two volumes, titled Selections from the Comprehensive Exposition of the Interpretation of the Verses of the Qurʾan. He received an ACLS Fellowship for 2018–2019 and a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, for fall 2018, in order to pursue new research projects on Zaydi legal tafsīr and theology.
Christopher Melchert has History degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz (1977), Princeton University (1983), and the University of Pennsylvania (1992). He has taught at Oxford University since 2000. He has published over thirty articles in journals and almost as many in edited collections. He has also published two books, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law (Leiden: Brill, 1997) and Ahmad ibn Hanbal (London: Oneworld, 2006). A third book, Before Sufism, is now in press. It proposes to historicize early Islamic renunciant piety.
Melchert became acquainted with medieval hadith criticism mainly through reading biographical dictionaries, the principal sources for his dissertation and first book. As for its history, his principal concern has always been to characterize its early stages so far as possible on the basis of early sources, resisting back projection of later ideas; for example, a sharp terminological distinction between hadith from the Prophet and āthār from later Muslims. He also writes about the intersections between hadith and law, notably the extent to which regional schools of law can be discerned, and between hadith and piety, notably finding that the hadith tradition of reporting on pious concerns seems less given to legend and back projection than the adab and Sufi traditions.
Pavel Pavlovitch is Professor in Medieval Islamic civilization at the Department of Arabic and Semitic Studies, Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. He holds a PhD in early Islamic history and the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences from Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. His research focuses on the methodology of hadith studies, emergence of hadith criticism, prosopography, and the history of early Islam. His major publications are: The Formation of the Islamic Understanding of Kalāla in the Second Century AH (718–816 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2016)). Between Scripture and Canon (Leiden: Brill, 2016); “Ḥadīth,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam Three, 2018, fasc. 4, 48–61.
Petra M. Sijpesteijn is Professor of Arabic at Leiden University. Her research concentrates on recovering the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, using the vast stores of radically under-used documents surviving from the early Islamic world. Started in 2017, she is the Principal Investigator of an international research project entitled “Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000),” funded by the European Research Council (2017–2021). She is the author of Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Roberto Tottoli (University of Naples, L’Orientale) is an Arabist and scholar of Islamic history and an expert in Arabic Qurʾānic manuscript traditions as well as in the history of European Latin and vernacular translations of the Qurʾān. His early studies and his PhD dealt with the stories of the biblical prophets in the Qurʾān and Islamic literature, especially in the early centuries of Islam. He later expanded his interests to hadith literature, Qurʾānic exegesis, and Muslim contemporary literature. In more recent years Professor Tottoli’s interests focus on issues around textual criticism in relation Arabic texts, the literary genres of Islamic literature, and contemporary Islam. His publications include Biblical Prophets in the Qurʾan and Muslim Literature (Richmond: RoutledgeCurzon, 2009) and The Stories of the Prophets of Ibn Muṭarrif al-Ṭarafī (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003).
Peter Webb is University Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University, and a specialist in classical Arabic literature and the history of the Arab people. His research investigates questions of pre-modern Arab identity and Muslim narratives of pre-Islamic history, using modern theoretical approaches of ethnogenesis and memory studies to interpret the Arabic literary sources. He published his work on Arab identity in a monograph, Imagining the Arabs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and in a joint project to edit and translate Ibn Qutaybah’s The Excellence of the Arabs (New York and London: New York University Press, 2017). Publications from his current Veni project, “Epic Pasts: Pre-Islam through Muslim Eyes,” awarded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (2018–2021), include a study of pre-Islamic outlaw stories, The Arab Thieves: al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar Vol. V, Sections 1–2 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Prior to his academic career, Peter was a solicitor at Clifford Chance LLP in London.