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Professor Shahab Ahmed
Barker Center
Harvard University
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Barker Center 413
617-495-4585
617-496-5798
msahmed@fas.harvard.edu

5273

Shahab Ahmed joined Harvard in Fall 2005 as Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies with a joint appointment between the Committee on the Study of Religion, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He was previously Mellon Visiting Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (2004-2005), Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2000-2003), and Assistant Professor of Classical Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo (1998-2000). He spent the academic year 2007-2008 as Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Visiting Scholar in the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad. He obtained his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1999, and his BA in Middle East History from the American University in Cairo in 1991, prior to which he attended the International Islamic University, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. He received his preparatory schooling in England at Caterham School, and in Singapore at the Anglo-Chinese School.

Shahab Ahmed’s broad field of study is Islamic intellectual history. He is currently completing a book, to be published from Harvard University Press, entitled The Problem of the Satanic verses and the Formation of Islamic Orthodoxy. He has taught the following courses at Harvard: “Quran”, “Hadith”, “Representations of the Prophet Muhammad through History”, “Ibn Taymiyyah and his Times”, “Orthodoxy: Religion, Truth, and Authority”, “The Vocabulary of Islam”, and “The Satanic Verses Problem in History”.