Arcapita Visiting Professor Dr. Ahmad Khan
Arcapita Visiting Professor Dr. Ahmad Khan
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Ahmad Khan to Columbia University as the Arcapita Visiting Professor for the Spring 2022 semester.
Ahmad Khan is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations (ARIC). He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies, where he also completed his MPhil. Prior to AUC, he worked at Oxford and Hamburg universities.
His research focuses on four fields of inquiry: heresy and orthodoxy in medieval Islam (8th-11th C.E.); the early Islamic empire (8th-10th C.E.); classical Islamic sciences (hadith, tafsir, sufism, and Islamic law); and print in the Islamic world, (19th-21st C.E.).
His first monograph, Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to Eleventh Centuries, will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. He is currently writing his second monograph on the relationship between Islamic law, religion, and empire in medieval Khurasan. He has also published articles on Islamic thought in the age of print, which will appear soon in Arabic as al-Islam wa al-Thawra al-Tibaʿiyya fi Misr wa ma wara’. He co-edited the volume Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). See here (https://www.aucegypt.edu/fac/ahmadkhan) for more on Khan's research and publications.
As the Arcapita Visiting Professor at Columbia, he is teaching a graduate course on 'Islamic Thought in an Age of Print.'
Publications and Projects
Books
Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to the Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
A. Khan and E. Kendall (eds.), Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016; paperback reissue 2018).
Articles (peer-reviewed)
An Empire of Elites: Mobility in the Early Islamic Empire, in S. Heidemann and H. Lena-Hagemann (eds.), Connecting the Early Islamic Empire: Transregional and Regional Elites (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2020), 147-69.
Dispatches from Cairo to India: Editors, Publishing Houses, and a Republic of Letters, Journal of Islamic Studies, 31:2 (2020), 226-55.
Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing, and Publishing the Classical Heritage, in Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016; paperback reissue 2018), 52-100.
Book Reviews
Review of A. Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Faḍā’il-i Balkh. Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, 98:2 (2021), 570-2.
Review of T. d’Haubert and A. Papas, Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, CA. 9th/15th-14th/20th Century. The Muslim World Book Review, 41:1 (2020), 42-46.
Review of T. Bernheimer, The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 750-1200. Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, 95:1 (2018), 201-5.