In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once known as Little Syria. Through the study of property maps, newspapers, oral history interviews, and immigration records, Chloe and Lydia have uncovered the story of this diasporic community from today’s Syria and Lebanon ..read more

Dr. Janan Delgado is the winner of the 2022 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for her dissertation entitled, "The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusī Mālikism, 3rd/9th to 6th/12th c." While scholars of Islamic law have produced numerous studies on marriage and divorce in recent decades, the topic of ḥaḍāna, or child custody, has received scant scholarly attention until now. In this longitudinal study of Mālikī legal texts including the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik b. Anas, Mudawwana of Saḥnūn, Kitāb al-kāfī of Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Bayān wa-l-taḥṣīl and the Muqaddimāt of Ibn Rush ..read more

Professor Leila Ahmed's book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992) was published in a time in which there was little scholarship on the history of women in Islam. Over the years, it became a classic and was re-published in 2021 with a new foreword by Professor Kecia Ali, who has used it in her own scholarship and also consistently in her teaching. In this episode, we talk to both scholars about Professor Ahmed's scholarship and the study of women and gender within Islamic studies, how far the field has come, and the work still ahead. Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Th ..read more

The Alwaleed Program team speaks with András Riedlmayer, former Aga Khan Bibliographer of Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library, about his career as a librarian, the development of the field of the history of Islamic art and architecture, and how his passion for cultural heritage preservation took him from working in Harvard's libraries to conducting field research in the war-torn streets of Kosovo and Bosnia and testifying as an expert witness for the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), even b ..read more

In this episode, we discuss the new edited volume, Islamic Scholarship in Africa: New Directions and Global Contexts, with its editor, Professor Ousmane Kane, and his colleague, Dr. Ebrima Sall, who wrote the conclusion. This volume is the product of two conferences convened at Harvard by Professor Kane in 2017 on "Texts, Knowledge, and Practice: The Meaning of Scholarship in Muslim Africa" and "New Directions in the Study of Islamic Scholarship in Africa" that brought together scholars of diverse disciplines from around the world to explore the understudied tradition of Arabo-Islamic scholars ..read more

The Alwaleed Program team speaks with Dr. Rushain Abbasi, winner of the 2021 Alwaleed bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies for his dissertation entitled, "Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam." In this study, Rushain challenges the prevailing view that maintains that premodern Muslims did not distinguish between the religious and the secular and that this distinction only emerged with the invention of these categories in the modern, post-Enlightenment West. His longue durée study demonstrates how numerous Muslim thinkers from the medieval ..read more

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic raised questions about how the health crisis, government-imposed lockdowns, and economic recession would affect religious faith and behavior. While many social scientists expected it to strengthen religiosity as people turned to their faith for comfort in a time of need, others suspected a religious recession could result from the limitations on communal religious activity. In this episode, we speak with three political scientists, Tarek Masoud, A. Kadir Yildirim, and Peter Mandaville, about their new study of religious behavior following the pandemic in the ..read more

In spring 2021, Hassaan Shahawy (A.B. '16, J.D. '22) was elected the 135th president of the Harvard Law Review, making him the first Muslim and first expert in Islamic law in the position. In the first half of our conversation, Hassaan talks about his background in Islamic law and how it contributes to his studies at Harvard Law School and work at the Harvard Law Review. He also shares his interests in broader social issues such as criminal justice reform and refugee issues. In the second half, we discuss Hassaan's Ph.D. dissertation entitled, "How Subjectivity Became Wrong: Early Hanafism and ..read more

Professor Ali Asani tells the Alwaleed Program team about his scholarly trajectory, beginning with his experiences coming to Harvard College as an international student from Kenya and entering Islamic studies as an Ismaili student in the early 1970s. He also discusses the importance of expanding perspectives in Islamic studies to include different interpretations of Islam, his interest in studying Islam as a living tradition in the lives of ordinary believers, especially through the arts, and his commitment to education beyond the walls of the university. Given Professor Asani's interest in th ..read more

Professor William Graham talks about his scholarly journey and how he "stumbled" into Islamic studies after pursuing other subjects including Classics and Sanskrit and Indian studies. He also shares his memories of his advisors at Harvard, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Muhsin Mahdi, and other scholars who shaped Islamic studies including Josef van Ess, Abdelhamid Sabra, Harry Wolfson, Annemarie Schimmel, and George Makdisi. Finally, Professor Graham reflects on his involvement across the different homes of Islamic studies at Harvard including Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Center f ..read more