Michael E. Asbury
completed his PhD at the Chair of Muslim Cultural and Religious History at the University of Erfurt in Germany in 2021. His dissertation, entitled “Seeing with the Heart: The Mysticism of an Islamic Sufi Lineage from India in the West,” studies the arrival and development, from the perspective of mystical doctrines and practices, of one multiple-tariqa line that expanded, beginning in the late 1970s, from India to the Euro-American sphere and beyond. His research interests include mysticism, comparative religion, Islam and Sufism in South Asia and in Europe and North America, the Naqshbandiyya, New Religious Movements and Western Esotericism.
Hasnain Bokhari
works as a Research Fellow for Internationalisation and Digitalisation of Education at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt. He worked as an Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Chair of Muslim Cultural and Religious History at that university, where he developed projects on the topics of cyber culture (funded by the daad) and peace education (funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, gfo). In addition, he has served as an independent consultant for a kfw/GFO-funded project. He is also associated with the Centre for Digital Development, University of Manchester, UK. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Erfurt.
David Yuzva Clement
is a lecturer at Carleton University’s School of Social Work. He received his doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of Erfurt and his Diploma of Social Work from the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany. He is affiliated with the Canadian network for research on Terrorism, Security and Society (tsas). He has held a variety of positions in social work and has recently published Offene Kinder- und Jugendarbeit im Kontext des Salafismus: Soziale Arbeit und Radikalisierungsprävention (2020).
Syed FurrukhZad
is a lead researcher working in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) field with various research organizations in Canada. He received his PhD from the University of Erfurt, studying cultural politics of islamophobia in Western Europe, and MPhil in International Relations from Quaid-i-Azam University
Thomas K. Gugler
is a member of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam at Goethe University. He graduated in South Asian Studies, Religious Studies and Psychology from lmu Munich and received his PhD with distinction at the University of Erfurt with a dissertation on Islamic missionary movements. He has been a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin and a member of the Clusters of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and “Religion and Politics” at wwu Münster. His monographs include Mission Medina: Daʿwat-e Islāmī und Tablīġī Ǧamāʿat (Würzburg, 2011) and Ozeanisches Gefühl der Unsterblichkeit (Berlin, 2009).
Jan-Peter Hartung
is Senior Research Fellow at the Erlangen Centre for Islam and Law in Europe at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His previous positions include a Readership in the Study of Islam at soas, University of London. He received his PhD in the Study of Religion from the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, and his Senior Doctorate (Habilitation) in the Study of Islam from the University of Bonn. His many research interests, reflected in his publications, include prominently the history of ideas in Islamicate South Asia and the wider Indo-Afghan world with an emphasis on political ideologies, the history of concepts and Indo-Muslim philosophy since the early modern period.
Marcia Hermansen
is Director of the Islamic World Studies program and Professor in the Theology Department at Loyola University Chicago where she teaches courses in Islamic Studies and the academic study of religion. She received her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago. Her numerous authored and co-edited books include Varieties of American Sufism (2020), Islam, Religions, and Pluralism in Europe (2016), Muslima Theology (2013), Shah Wali Allah’s Treatises on Islamic Law (2011) and The Conclusive Argument from God (1996). She writes on Islamic thought, Sufism, Islam and Muslims in South Asia, Muslims in America, and Women and Gender in Islam.
is a senior Professor of Islamic Jurisprudence and Islamic Thought at the University of Tübingen. He started his academic career at the University of Tunis and earned a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Erfurt. He was Lecturer for Islamic Studies and Arabic at several Western universities and in the Islamic world. His main research fields are Islamic law and ethics, minority law, human rights and Islamic education. He is a member of several publishing, advising, social and political boards in Europe and worldwide.
Soraya Khodamoradi
is a contract lecturer at the University of Erfurt. She is a specialist in the field of Islamic Studies and the intellectual history of Islamicate India with a focus on Sufism. She has been active in different international research projects such as “Perso-Indica, An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Tradition,” and “Prophet Muhammad in the Mirror of His Community in Early Modern and Modern Islam.” Among her publications are Sufi Reform in Eighteenth Century India: Khwaja Mir Dard of Delhi (1721–1785) (Berlin: eb Verlag, 2019) and a joint article with Carl W. Ernst entitled “Risāla-yi Shaṭṭāriyya” (in Perso-Indica, 2018).
Reik Kirchhof
graduated with a Master in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and was awarded a PhD in Islamic Studies by the University of Erfurt. His research is mainly devoted to foundational research on theories of normative orders and law with a focus on Islam. He is currently working on a theoretical framework for the study of social integration. Most recently, he authored the book Grundlegung einer Soziologie der Scharia (2019). He furthermore graduated in law and is practicing as a barrister-at-law in Berlin.
Ali Altaf Mian
is Assistant Professor of Religion and Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Florida. His research has been published in Islamic Law and Society, History of Religions, Der Islam, Journal of Urdu Studies, Qui Parle and ReOrient. He is currently working on two book projects: Muslims in South Asia (for Edinburgh University Press) and Surviving Modernity: Ashraf ‘Ali Thanvi (1863–1943) and Genres of World-Making in Modern South Asian Islam. He is also the editor of The Bruce B. Lawrence Reader: Islam beyond Borders (Duke University Press, 2021).
is Professor of the Intellectual History of Islam at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She obtained her PhD in Islamic Studies (2009) at the University Bochum with a thesis on the history of Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the twentieth century. Since 2005, she has conducted teaching and research activities in the History of Islam and Islamic Studies at universities in Germany, the US and Switzerland and had visiting professorships in Islamic Studies at the Universities of Hamburg (2014) and Zurich (2017). She has published on the intellectual history of Islam in Southeastern Europe in the modern period, as well as on current developments in transnational Islamic religious thought.
Tariq Rahman
is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, and a Distinguished National Professor. He has a PhD (1985) and DLitt (2014) from the University of Sheffield and was the first Pakistani to be given the Humboldt Research Award in 2012. He was a Salzburg Seminar fellow and a member of the Common Room at Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. He has been the incumbent of the Pakistan Chair at the University of California, Berkeley and has taught briefly at the University of Aarhus, Denmark and the Peace University in Spain.
Stefan Reichmuth
is former Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, at present Senior Researcher, at Ruhr University Bochum (Germany). His research has focused on the history of Arabic and Islamic education and learning in a transregional perspective, on Arabic language and literature in Africa, and, more recently, on the Prophet in the mirror of Muslim society, culture and politics since the early modern period. He was chief editor of the journal Die Welt des Islams (2002–2016), member of the scientific council no. 106 of the dfg (2008–2016), and chairman of the Islamological section of the German Oriental Society (dmg, 2011–2019).
Reinhard Schulze
is Director of the transdisciplinary Forum Islam and the Middle East, University of Bern, Switzerland. After studying Islamic Studies, Semitic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Bonn, he earned his doctorate in 1981 and then held positions at the universities of Hamburg, Essen and Bonn. After his postdoctoral research (Habilitation), he was appointed as a professor
Itzchak Weismann
is Professor of Islamic Studies and former Director of the Jewish-Arab Center at the University of Haifa. His research interests focus on modern Islamic movements and ideologies. He published widely on the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism, Sufism and jihadi organizations in the Middle East (especially Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia), in South Asia and worldwide. His latest monograph is Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi: Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism (Oneworld, 2015). He is also scientific editor of the Sahar (Crescent) series of translations into Hebrew of major modern Islamic texts.
Pnina Werbner
is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University. She is author of “The Manchester Migration Trilogy,” including The Migration Process (1990/2002), Imagined Diasporas (2002) and Pilgrims of Love (2003), on South Asians in Britain and Pakistan. She has edited several theoretical collections on Sufism, hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, migration and citizenship, including Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism (2008) and The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest (2014). Her most recent books are The Making of an African Working Class (2014) and African Customary Justice: Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Public Ethics (2022).
Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh
is a habilitated lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Erfurt. His research is mainly devoted to the study of Sufism (in both medieval and modern times), comparative mysticism and Persian literature. His recent publications include Practical Mysticism in Islam and Christianity (Routledge, 2016) and Sufism East and West: Mystical Islam and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Modern World (Brill, 2019, co-edited with Jamal Malik). He is co-editing, along with Marcia Hermansen, Sufism in Western Contexts (Brill, forthcoming), is the guest editor of Sufism in the Modern World (special issue of Religions), and is an associate editor of the Mawlana Rumi Review.