Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Associate Professor of Religious Studies

(Ph.D. Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, 1994)

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Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. A recipient of several fellowships, including a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in South Asian Islam and the Greater Muslim World (the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, Durham, 1995-96) and a National Humanities Center fellowship (2000-01), his major research interests include: religious authority in classical, medieval, and modern Islam; history of Islamic law in the Middle East and in late medieval and modern South Asia; institutions and traditions of learning in Islam; Islamic political thought; and contemporary religious and political movements in the Muslim world.

He is the author of The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and of Religion and Politics under the Early `Abbasids (Leiden: Brill, 1997).Besides articles in leading scholarly journals in his areas of interest, he has contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Brill), and the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan).

Some of his recently completed and forthcoming articles, written for various edited volumes, have been concerned with facets of medieval and modern Islamic cosmopolitanism; Muslim conceptions of the common good; pluralism, democracy and the `ulama; and modern Muslim discourses on consensus. At present, he is working on two major projects: “Authority, Tradition, and the Rhetoric of Consensus in Islam” and “Internal Criticism in Modern Islam.” In addition, he is completing a biography of Mawlana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi (d. 1943), a leading religious scholar of twentieth-century South Asia, for a new series from One World Publications (Oxford) on the “Makers of the Muslim World.

From: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Religious_Studies/faculty/zaman.html