Welcoming Rushain Abbasi as Assistant Professor of Early Islam

We are pleased to announce that Rushain Abbasi will join the Religious Studies Department in the Fall of ’23 as an Assistant Professor of Early Islam. Dr. Abbasi comes to this position as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. He received his PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University in 2021, where his dissertation was awarded the prestigious Alwaleed Bin Talal Prize for Best Dissertation in Islamic Studies. He formerly served as an Associate Research Scholar at the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School.

Dr. Abbasi’s forthcoming book (set to be published with Princeton University Press in 2023) is a sweeping intellectual history, which traces the development of the idea of the secular in the premodern Islamic world. His study is aimed at undermining the current academic orthodoxy which maintains that the distinction between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular is a modern European invention and thus wholly at odds with an Islamic worldview.

We are pleased to welcome Professor Abbasi to the growing field of Islamic Studies at Stanford!

To contact Dr. Abbasi or to learn more about his work, visit >>>