See below the list of our members.
How to join?
If you would like to join the International Hadith Studies Network, you will need to create an account on https://hcommons.org/ and, once you have an hcommons account, you will be able to request access to our private Group called IHSN (just search for “IHSN” on https://hcommons.org/groups/). If you want your name and a short biography of yours to appear below, please add it when you request access to our group. We look forward to welcoming you in our International Hadith Studies Network!
Jasser Abou Archid
Jasser Abou Archid is a Ph.D. student at the institute of Islamic Theology of Osnabrück University.
Mehmetcan Akpinar
Mehmetcan Akpınar is Assistant Instructional Professor at the NELC and Divinity of the University of Chicago. Previously he was a Junior Research and Teaching Fellow (Nachwuchswissenschaftler/Habilitand) at the Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies of Tübingen University, Germany. He researches and teaches on different topics of Islamic Intellectual History. He received his doctorate with honors from the University of Chicago, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, with a dissertation entitled “Narrative Representations of Abu Bakr in the 2nd / 8th century.”
Belal Alabbas
Belal Alabbas is a Lecturer at the Department of Theology and Religion of the University of Bristol, UK. Previous to this role, he was awarded a British Academy Newton International Fellowship to work on the theories and practices of hadith criticism in the Twelver Shīʿī tradition. He was also a graduate associate faculty member from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford, UK. He has worked extensively on Ḥadīth literature and his thesis, “Between Scripture and Human Reason: The Life and Works of Muḥammad ibn Ismā’īl al-Bukhārī (d.256/870)“, analyses the gap between the romanticized version of al-Bukhārī and his pre-canonical historical record. In his latest article, he also delves into “The Principles of Hadith Criticism in the Writings of al-Shāfiʿī and Muslim“.
Ilyass Amharar
Ilyass Amharar is a postdoctoral Iremam associate researcher at the Jacques Berque Center (CNRS – Rabat). He specialised in the history of Ash’arism in the Maghreb. He is interested in the relationship between Ash’arism and other disciplines such as Malikism, legal theory or Hadith. He is currently piloting a project on the history of Ash’arism through manuscripts.
Alaa Awad
Maroussia Bednarkiewicz
Maroussia Bednarkiewicz is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen. She studied German and Russian languages, cultures, and history in Geneva and did a Master in translation at Geneva’s School of Translation and Interpretation. She worked as a translator for different organisations and publishing houses while doing a second Master in Islamic studies and History at the University of Oxford. Her PhD dissertation delved into the Hadith literature about the history of the Islamic call to prayer (adhān). She is currently involved in the development of digital means to pre-analyse classical Arabic texts and has designed a tool to automate the drawing of isnād trees. She was recently awarded a fellowship by the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, USA in collaboration with Irene Kirchner, to add the Classical Arabic language to one of the most famous program for Natural Language Processing.
Joel Blecher
Joel Blecher is Assistant Professor of History at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences in George Washington University, USA. His research, which combines methods from social and intellectual history, is grounded in archives and field sites in Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and India, as well as various manuscript libraries across Europe and North America. His first book, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018), explores the rich history of the practice of hadith commentary in the times and places it flourished the most—classical Andalusia, medieval Egypt, and early modern India. His interview regarding ḥadīth commentaries can be access on this website.
Ursula Bsees
Ursula Bsees is a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is currently working on aḥādīth in papyri and has published extensively on her findings including a study of four ḥadīth papyri from the Austrian National Library Papyrus collection and a preliminary insight into the daily work of early muḥaddithīn.
Issam Eido
Issam Eido is Senior Lecturer of Arabic Languages and Literatures at Vanderbilt University and former Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic from the University of Chicago Divinity School (2013-2015). Eido’s research focuses on the Qur’an in late antiquity, Hadīth Studies, Sufism, and Arabic language. He also worked closely with Nashville Ballet to produce the world premier of Layla and the Majnun. His monograph, Early Hadīth Scholars and their Criteria of Hadīth Criticism, is a two-volume work on the criteria followed by the scholars of hadith (muhaddith), Hanafī legal experts (fuqahā’) and rationalist theologians (mu’tazila) in the early Islamic period (8th-11th centuries).
Usman Ghani
Usman Ghani is Assitant Professor at the American University of Sharjah. His research focuses on classical Islamic literature in Arabic, Islamic jurisprudence and theology. More specifically, he is interested in Hadith and Sunna both in their historical context and contemporary expression as well as their relationship with Mu’tazili. He wrote his PhD thesis at the University of Exter, UK, about “Abu Hurayra a narrator of Hadith revisited“.
Raashid Goyal
Raashid S. Goyal is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, where he is preparing his dissertation on “War and Law in the First Islamic Polity: A Study of the Terms of Capitulation Tradition.” His research interests include the history, languages, and literature of pre-modern Arabia and the Near East, particularly the development of legal and political ideas in the early centuries of Islam, the ḥadīth literature, and classical Arabic poetry and lexicography. Among his recently completed projects is an article that uses ḥadīth-critical methods to interrogate the mysterious Khārijite affiliation of the great Basran philologist and historian Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā, and a comprehensive study of the earliest biographical writings by ḥadīth scholars.
Aurangzeb Haneef
Aurangzeb Haneef is a Ph.D. Candidate in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he is working on “Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 778) and Early Qur’anic Exegesis” under the supervision of Andreas Goerke. He holds a Master of Theological Studies (Islamic Studies) from Harvard University’s Divinity School and an International Master in Peace, Conflict, and Development Studies from the Universidad Jaime I (UNESCO Chair for Philosophy of Peace), Spain and the University of Innsbruck, Austria (Thesis title: Religion and Peacebuilding: Paradigm of Peace, Nonviolence and the Use of Force in Islam). He is currently teaching undergraduate courses in the Study of Religion/Islam at a private university in Lahore.
Edmund Hayes
Edmund Hayes is a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. He works on early Islamic history, in particular Shiʿi history, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. He is currently investigating the relationship between fiscal policy and religious protest in early Islam. He also has ongoing projects comparing the institutions of excommunication in Islam, Christianity and Judaism; and investigating the development of Islamic canonical revenues, ghanīma, fayʾ, kharāj, khums, anfāl, ṣadaqa, and zakāt, the ways in which these terms overlap and relate to each other, and the ways in which they were both practically applied and conceptualized by early Islamic jurists and thinkers. He is currently working on a book entitled “Agents of the Hidden Imam: the Birth Pangs of Twelver Shiʿism, 850-950 CE.” He is a member of the Leiden University Shiʿi Studies Initiative (LUSSI).
Seyfeddin Kara
Seyfeddin Kara is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at The University of Toronto and Lund University.
He was awarded a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Durham, UK, in 2015. He is a Board Member of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies. Dr Kara was previously a Teaching Fellow at the University of Durham, UK and Assistant Professor (Imam Ali Chair) at Hartford Seminary, US. He has published research articles in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Muslim World and the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. He is the author of In Search of Ali ibn Abi Talib’s Codex: History and Traditions of the Earliest Copy of the Qur’an. He is currently writing a monograph on the Textual integrity of the Qur’an.
Irene Kirchner
Irene Kirchner is a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University in the department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. The dynamic between religion, law and politics has intrigued her since she first lived and worked in Egypt in 2004. In her dissertation, she is particularly interested in ḥadīth forgeries as a historical source for early theological and legal debates and is planning to use computational analysis techniques to detect how Ḥadīth forgeries have been incorporated in an Islamic identity construction. She has recently started to delve into Natural Language Processing techniques such as topic modeling and authorship attribution and is exploring the intersection between Islamic Studies and the Digital Humanities. She is also the founder of the Islamicate Digital Humanities Network. She was recently awarded a fellowship by the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University, USA in collaboration with Maroussia Bednarkiewicz to add the Classical Arabic language to one of the most famous program for Natural Language Processing.
Fatma Kızıl
Fatma Kızıl head of the Journal for Hadith and Sira Studies in Istanbul.
Teruaki Moriyama
Teruaki Moriyama is an Associate Professor in the School of Theology at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan). His dissertation analyzed how medieval Hadith scholars, who called themselves ‘Ashab al-Hadith,’ compiled, distributed and used the biographical local histories, such as History of Baghdad by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (d. 1071), in their scholarly activities.
Pavel Pavlovitch
Pavel Pavlovitch is professor of Medieval Arabo-Islamic Civilization in the Center for Oriental Languages and Cultures at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski,” and head of the Chair of Arabic and Semitic Studies. He has been publishing extensively on ḥadīth literature, further testing the isnād-cum-matn analysis and notably exploring the origin of the isnād.
David S. Powers
David S. Powers (Ph.D., Princeton, 1979) is a native of Cleveland, Ohio and long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1979 and began teaching at Cornell in the same year. He currently holds positions as a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern, an Adjunct Professor at the Cornell Law School, and Director of the Medieval Studies Program. His courses deal with Islamic civilization, Islamic history and law, and classical Arabic texts, and his research focuses on the emergence of Islam and Islamic legal history. He is founding editor of the journal Islamic Law and Society.
Elias Gabriel Saba
Elias G. Saba is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Grinnell College. His research focuses on the changing uses and interpretations of the classical Arabo-Islamic heritage in a variety of chronological and geographic contexts. He is particularly interested in the legacies of the literary and legal traditions in Arabic writing. In his PhD dissertation, “What’s The Difference? Distinctions, Furūq, And Development In Post-Formative Islamic Law“, he investigated the “legal distinctions” (al-furūq al-fiqhiyya) literature and its role in the development of Islamic legal thinking. He has also published several articles on the website books&ideas.
Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino
Ruggero Vimercati Sanseverino is Junior-Professor at the Center for Islamic Theology, Tübingen University, Germany, and holder of the Chair for Hadith Studies and Prophetic Tradition. He specializes on the transmission of Hadith (report about the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad), on classical and modern Islamic prophetology and on the history of Islamic spirituality. His thesis is dedicated to the hagiographical tradition of the city of Fez in Morocco and has been published in 2014. His current research focuses on relationship between prophetology and ḥadīth transmission according to a famous theological treatise of the 12th century. His studies, dealing with Moroccan hagiography, the history of Sufism, Sunni prophetology, hadith and comparative theology, have been published amongst others in the Encyclopedia of Islam, Arabica, Studia Islamica and in the prize-winning Encyclopedia Muhammad in history, thought and culture (ABC-Clio 2014). He is involved in the preparation of several research networks and groups, such as an interdisciplinary research program on the conceptions of the divine in the three monotheistic religions (Tübingen), the functions and typologies of holy places in Islam (Edinburgh), the conception of an European Master on Interreligious Studies (UE, Strasbourg) and the veneration of the Prophet in Islam (ANR-DFG).
Jens Scheiner
Jens Scheiner is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany. His research interests are political and social history of the early and classical periods of Islam and ḥadīth Studies (in particular isnad-cum-matn analysis). He published on the early Muslim conquests, the cultural history of Baghdad and hadith.
Mairaj Syed
Mairaj U. Syed is an Associate Professor in the department of religious studies at the University of California, Davis, USA. His research explores the history of Islamic legal and ethical thought, particularly areas dealing with public law, family law, and politics. He is also interested in the development of hadith literature and the social network that transmitted and preserved it in the first 250 years of Islamic history.
Adam Walker
Adam Walker is completing a Ph.D. at Radboud University, the Netherlands. In his dissertation he is utilising isnād-cum-matn analysis to trace the historical genesis of a widely circulated tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, the ḥadīth al-manzila. His primary focus on tracking how and what the changes in the genesis of a tradition’s mutūn (e.g. anachronism, redaction, embellishment, fabrication, etc.), from Common Link to compiler(s), aims at testing the ICM methodology to extract important information about the literary, social, political and religious implications of the ḥadīth al-manzila. He is the series manager of Library of Arabic and Islamic Heritage, led by Gorgias Press and The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS). The project will make available to academics, independent scholars and research institutes a diverse range of classical Arabic texts that continue to play a central role in the rich and vast development of Islamic thought and culture. He is also a regular contributor to the Middle East Eye journal.