Board of advisors
Ali Zargar
Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida
Cyrus Ali Zargar is Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida. His most recent book, The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism, was published in 2017 by Oneworld Press. His first book, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in Ibn ʿArabi and ʿIraqi, was published in 2011 by the University of South Carolina Press. Zargar’s research interests focus on the literature of medieval Sufism in Arabic and Persian. This includes metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical intersections between Sufism and Islamic philosophy.
Mohammed Rustom
PhD Professor of Islamic Thought College of the Humanities
Mohammed Rustom is Professor of Islamic Thought at Carleton University. An internationally recognized scholar whose works have been translated into over ten languages, he specializes in Islamic philosophy, Sufism, Quranic exegesis, and cross-cultural philosophy. Professor Rustom is author of the award-winning book The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mullā Ṣadrā (2012), co-editor of The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (2015), author of Inrushes of the Heart: The Sufi Philosophy of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt (2022), and editor of Global Philosophy: A Sourcebook (forthcoming).
Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Fellow of History at the University of South Carolina
Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book. His several forthcoming books include The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (2020).
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed
Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought - UC Berkeley
Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the continued life of Islamic philosophy as it was absorbed and transformed in Islamic theology and mysticism through both the Arabic and Persian textual traditions. She earned her BA from Yale University in 2010, where she majored in Religious Studies, and her Master’s of Arts in Religion (MAR) from Yale Divinity School in 2012 with a concentration in Philosophy of Religion. In 2018, she completed her doctorate in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her published work includes articles in such journals as Oriens, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, and the Journal of Persianate Studies, as well as book chapters in the edited volumes Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (American University of Beirut Press, 2021) and Women’s Contemporary Readings of Medieval (and Modern) Arabic Philosophy (Springer, 2022). Her current book project, for which she was awarded an NEH Summer Stipend in 2022, addresses the eminent 12th-century Muslim theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s engagement with the Islamic philosophical movement and his gradual development of a notion of a two-fold path to knowledge of God and thus to the felicity of the soul through knowledge.
Seyfeddin Kara
Assistant Professor of Islamic Origins
Dr. Seyfeddin Kara is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Origins. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Durham, UK. Dr Kara’s academic journey includes a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, with research terms at the University of Toronto, the University of Lund, and the University of Göttingen. He has received over 300,000 Euros in grants from the European Union, Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and other funding bodies.
He is a Board Member of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies and a Fellow of UK Advance Higher Education. Dr Kara has also taught at the University of Durham, UK, and served as an Assistant Professor at Hartford International University, US.
His scholarly work encompasses research articles in journals such as the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Muslim World, and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. Dr. Kara authored In Search of Ali ibn Abi Talib’s Codex: History and Traditions of the Earliest Copy of the Qur’an and is currently preparing a monograph on the Textual Integrity of the Qur’an.
He is presently open to supervising PhD candidates.
