Areas of Specialization
The Qurʾān and its commentaries; intellectual history of classical (ca. 900 - 1200) and post-classical (ca. 1200-1900) Islam; the Mu‘tazila; Sufism; covenant and covenants in Islam; discourse on miracles in Islam; theories and methods in Religious Studies.
Current Projects (Book)
The Meaning of Islamic Miracles examines the ways that miracles were defined, defended, classified, contested, and interpreted in Islamic societies. Defined: Muslim theologians and mystics (Sufis) defined miracles within a cosmological framework that centralized all events under God’s custom. Rejecting the notion of causal necessity in the natural world and ascribing all events to God’s custom, they posited that miracles are essentially disruptions in God’s custom, which follows a habit but does not proceed in a necessary way. Defended: Muslim theologians defended miracles as confirmations of the prophet’s authority. They passionately debated the way that such acts served as testimony of a person who claims to be a prophet. Classified: Muslim scholars developed a classification system that mapped the full range of extraordinary acts—miracles, marvels, trickery, divination, magic, and spells—onto a scheme of piety (or “saintliness”). Contested: Muslim philosophers, who largely adopted a Hellenistic worldview, explained miracles by grounding them in a thoroughly mechanical and rationalistic account of the universe, stripping them of the meanings that theologians and mystics had ascribed to them. Interpreted: The aforementioned extraordinary within Islamic societies were interpreted as symbols that reinforced the values that Islamic culture ascribed to holy persons.
Current Projects (Articles)
Covenant and Creation in Islam. I am currently writing a three part article that traces the theme of “covenant” and related concepts in Islamic intellectual history—a theme that the Islamic tradition shares with other cultural and religious traditions that emerged within the Near East and that later emerged within the Reformed tradition of Christianity. An overview of covenant theology in Islam and several initial discoveries that I have made appeared in a festschrift for Andrew Rippin under the title, "Is there Covenant Theology in Islam?"
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī on Intuition: The History of an Aristotelian-Avicennian Philosophical Idea in Islamic Theology. This paper contributes to our understanding of the complex and protracted process through which Ashʿarī-Sunnī theologians appropriated methods, ideas, and concepts from Ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy and subsequently deployed them to explain religious phenomena. It focuses on the Aristotelian notion of “intuition” that Avicenna (d. 1037) introduced as the lynchpin of his comprehensive philosophical system, and which Rāzī and other leading Sunnī theologians introduced into their worldview that recognized, equally, the authorities of human reason and revelation. By charting this salient aspect of the process of appropriation and naturalization, my ultimate aims is to explain the innovative ways that Ashʿarī-Sunnī theologians subjected supernatural phenomena (including miracles, revelation, and prophecy) to the critique of human reason and brought explanations of such phenomena into line with Aristotelian-Avicennian logic, epistemology, and cosmology.
Essay on the Absence of Islamic Faith (More words coming soon.)
Monograph
My first book project, Rāzī: Master of Qurʾānic Interpretation and Theological Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 2015), focused on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210), a towering Muslim intellectual whose writings mark a momentous turning point in the Islamic tradition. Rāzī was a leading representative of Sunnī orthodoxy in medieval Islam. Imbued with the heritage of Greek learning and inculcated with an Islamic education, he was the first intellectual to exploit the rich heritage of ancient and Islamic philosophy to interpret the Qurʾān; and he was the first to forge a methodology that unites reason (ʿaql) and scripture (naql).
My monograph explored Rāzī’s intellectual project, which was one of the most ambitious in the history of Islam. Its principal aim was to examine Rāzī’s boldly unconventional intellectual project and to situate it within the broader arc of the Islamic tradition. While previous scholarship in the field of Rāzī studies concentrated on ethics, logic, and epistemology, extremely little attention had been devoted to Rāzī’s magnum opus—his Qurʾān commentary—and on the pivotal role that it played in Islamic intellectual history. I focused mainly on Rāzī’s Qurʾān commentary.
My broad objectives were to explain how Rāzī used the Qurʾān to express his philosophical theology; how Rāzī resolved major methodological conflicts concerning the application of intellect or reason (ʿaql) to scripture (naql); and how he devised rules and principles of Qurʾānic interpretation by assimilating methods and ideas from diverse intellectual currents into Sunnī theology and exegesis. My ultimate goal was to chart the process through which Rāzī appropriated ideas from Aristotelian-Avicennian philosophy (as well as Muʿtazilism) and naturalized them into Sunnī theology and exegesis.