Shahab Ahmed
Shahab Ahmed (December 11, 1966 – September 17, 2015) was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto."[1]
Life
Ahmed's parents were Pakistani doctors. Born in Singapore, he was educated at an English boarding school before studying at International Islamic University Malaysia. After work as a journalist in Afghanistan, he gained a master's degree at the American University in Cairo and his PhD at Princeton University.[2] He was a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2000-2003), and served as a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at Princeton University (2004-2005), Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University (2005-2014), Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Visiting Scholar at the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad (2007-2008), and Lecturer on Law and Research Fellow in Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School (2014-2015).[3][4][5]
A polyglot who was "master of perhaps 15 languages",[6] Ahmed’s broad field of study was Islamic intellectual history, with a special interest in the Satanic Verses incident and the evaluation of its historicity by Islamic scholars of the medieval period.[7][8]
Select publications
- “Ibn Taymiyyah and the Satanic Verses”. Studia Islamica 87 (1998): 67–124.
- “The Sultan's Syllabus: A Curriculum for the Ottoman Imperial Medreses Prescribed in a Fermān of Qānūnī I Süleymān, Dated 973 (1565)”, cowritten with Nenad Filipovic. Studia Islamica 98/99 (2004): 183–218
- Ibn Taymiyya and his Times. Coedited with Yossef Rapoport. Oxford University Press; 1st Edition: September 9, 2015. (ISBN 019940206X)
- What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton University Press: November 17, 2015 (ISBN 0691164185)
References
- ↑ Muhanna, Elias (11 January 2016). "Contradiction and Diversity". The Nation. 302 (2&3): 28.
- ↑ Malise Ruthven, 'More than a Religion', London Review of Books, 8 September 2016.
- ↑ Noah Feldman (20 September 2015). "An Extraordinary Scholar Redefined Islam". Bloomberg View. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
- ↑ http://beenasarwar.com/2015/09/20/rip-shahab-ahmed-prominent-islamic-scholar-from-pakistan/
- ↑ http://nelc.fas.harvard.edu/shahab-ahmed-1966-2015
- ↑ Noah Feldman (20 September 2015). "An Extraordinary Scholar Redefined Islam". Bloomberg View. Retrieved 26 October 2015.
- ↑ "M. Shahab Ahmed | NELC - Harvard University". Web.archive.org. 2014-04-10. Archived from the original on April 10, 2014. Retrieved 2016-01-05.
- ↑ Muhanna, Elias (2015-12-23). "How Has Islamic Orthodoxy Changed Over Time?". The Nation. Retrieved 2016-01-05.