Director, Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies

Associate Professor of History & Religious Studies

  Ahmet T. Karamustafa (Ph.D., McGill University, 1987) is Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also directs the Religious Studies Program.

He is the author of God’s Unruly Friends (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), a monograph on ascetic movements in medieval Islamic mysticism and Vahidi’s Menakib-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can (929/1522): Critical Edition and Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1993), a study of a sixteenth-century mystical text in Ottoman Turkish.

He is also the assistant editor as well as the author of several articles in Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Professor Karamustafa’s main area of research is premodern Islamic thought; he is currently working on a book on conceptions of the individual in the Islamic world during the thirteenth century.

At Washington University, Professor Karamustafa teaches courses on all aspects of Islam, Islamic history as well as general courses in Religious Studies. These include Islamic Religion: An Introduction; Approaches to the Qur’an and Mohammed; Sufism: The Struggle with ‘Self’ in Islam; Islam in Africa; Islam in North America; Islam and Modernity; Understanding Islamic Rituals; Islamic Religious Traditions; Islamic Legal Traditions; Soul, Self, Person in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: A Comparative Examination.”

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~akaramus/