Chair:
Roy P. Mottahedeh
Gurney Professor of History, Department of History, and Director, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.

Roy Mottahedeh joined Harvard's history department faculty as professor of Islamic history in 1986, and has served as director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He was appointed Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University in 2006.

Professor Mottahedeh's major work is on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East. His publications include Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (1980) and The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (1985), and Lessons in Islamic Jurisprudence (2003). He is the faculty adviser of a journal, The Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review. He is currently working on a book on Iraq.

Steering Committee Members (2006-09):

Shahab Ahmed,
Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies

Shahab Ahmed joined Harvard in Fall 2005 as Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies with a joint appointment between the Committee on the Study of Religion, and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He was previously Mellon Visiting Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (2004-2005), Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2000-2003), and Assistant Professor of Classical Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo (1998-2000). He obtained his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1999, and his BA in Middle East History from the American University in Cairo in 1991, prior to which he attended the International Islamic University, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. He received his preparatory schooling in England at Caterham School, and in Singapore at the Anglo-Chinese School.

Shahab Ahmed's broad field of study is Islamic intellectual history. He is currently completing a book entitled The Problem of the Satanic verses and the Formation of Islamic Orthodoxy, of which his PhD dissertation forms the first chapter. The titles of his courses include: “Quran”, “Hadith”, “Representations of the Prophet Muhammad through history”, and “Ibn Taymiyyah and his times”.

Ali S. Asani,
Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture

Professor Asani holds a joint appointment between NELC and the Study of Religion. He also serves on the faculty of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, offering instruction in a variety of languages such as Urdu/Hindi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Swahili as well as courses on various aspects of the Islamic tradition. He currently directs the University's Ph.D. program in Indo-Muslim Culture.

His books include: The Bujh Niranjan: An Ismaili Mystical Poem; The Harvard Collection of Ismaili Literature in Indic Literatures: A Descriptive Catalog and Finding Aid; Celebrating Muhammad: Images of the Prophet in Muslim Devotional Poetry (co-author); Al-Ummah: A Handbook for an Identity Development Program for North American Muslim Youth; Ecstasy and Enlightenment: The Ismaili Literature of South Asia; Let's Study Urdu: An Introduction to the Urdu Script and Let's Study Urdu: An Introductory Course (co-authored, forthcoming, Yale University Press, 2007).

Professor Asani has been particularly active post-September 11th in improving the understanding Islam and its role in Muslim societies by conducting workshops for high school and college educators as well as making presentations at various public forums. More recently, he has been involved in the Islamic Cultural Studies Initiative, an international professional development program for high school teachers in Kenya, Pakistan and Texas intended to promote a culturally and historically based approach to the study of Islam and Muslim societies.

In 2002, he was awarded the Harvard Foundation medal for his outstanding contributions to improving intercultural and race relations at Harvard and in the nation.

MaryJo DelVecchio Good,
Professor of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Professor of Social Medicine, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 1977. She came to medical sociology through "kismet" and an interest in religion and politics, and power and hierarchy. She has been teaching courses on medical sociology since 1984 in the Department of Sociology, FAS, and advises undergraduates and graduate students interested in the social studies of medicine and health policy on theses. Her current research interests include cultural and comparative studies of biomedicine, bioethics, and biotechnology; globalization of medical knowledge and markets; and gender, health policy and international health. Professor Good began her research career working in Turkey and Iran; she is on the Standing Committee for the Center for Middle Eastern Studie s at Harvard and chaired the gender seminar for five years. In 1996 and 1997 she spent the spring term in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a Fulbright Scholar at Gadjah Mada University; she regularly returns there to work with faculty developing a program in bioethics and the social sciences.

Professor Good is a member of the Ad Hoc Review Committee on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in the Human Genome project (ELSI) for NIH, and was a member of the UN Task Force on Policy on Women's Health. Currently, Professor Good teaches and advises medical students, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars and graduate students as well as undergraduates in seminars, lectures, and tutorials at Harvard Medical School, at HST -- the joint Harvard-MIT program in Health, Science and Technology -- and at Harvard University.

Wolfhart P. Heinrichs,
James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Wolfhart Heinrichs’ scholarly interests lie in the fields of medieval Arabic literary theory, Islamic legal theory, and Neo-Aramaic. Recent publications include: "Obscurity in Classical Arabic Poetry," in Mediaevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies 19 (1996 [for 1993]), 239-59; and "Prosimetrical Genres in Classical Arabic Literature," in J. Harris and K. Reichl (eds.), Prosimetrum, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 249-275. Heinrichs sits on the editorial boards of Encyclopaedia of Islam, Mélanges Université St. Joseph, and Monograph Series ILSP.

Allan Hill,
Andelot Professor of Demography

Allan Hill is a medical demographer with regional interests in West Africa and the Middle East. He is Head of the Education Office in the Department and chairs the Masters degree committee.

Through the Health Office of the Harvard Institute for International Development, Allan Hill manages the Polio project within the Applied Research on Child Health (ARCH) project direct by Dr. Jonathan Simon. This main thrust of this work is to discover reasons for the non-participation of young children in routine immunization programs or in national immunization days. These efforts are focused particularly on ways to achieve very high immunization rates in poor urban communities in West Africa with a view to eliminating polio from the region in the near future.

Other work in Egypt with Drs. John Weeks and Saad Gadalla from University College of San Diego is combining census and survey data with images from high-resolution satellite photography to map the spatial dimensions of the health and fertility transitions in Cairo and governorate of Menoufia. This work is being expanded to Tunisia and Jordan where both good demographic data and a series of satellite images are available for both countries.

Allan Hill also manages two institutional links overseas -- one with Dr. Hoda Rashad and the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo and the other with Dr. Ofusu-Ammah at the School of Public Health, University of Ghana in Accra. The link with Cairo allows faculty from Harvard to contribute to the annual course "From science to action: reproductive health in the Arab world" as well as the comparative analysis of the survey data on the health and fertility transitions in Arab countries.

Baber Johansen,
Professor of Islamic Religious Studies, Harvard Divinity School

Baber Johansen’s research and teaching focus on the relationship between religion and law in the classical and the modern Muslim world. He is particularly interested in the role that religious and legal systems assign to the practices of laypeople as factors that exert an influence on the interpretation of sacred norms. His book Muhammad Husain Haikal Europa und der Orient im Weltbild eines ägyptischen Liberalen (1967) examines twentieth-century liberal interpretations of Islam; Islam und Staat (1982) looks at modern Muslim debates on state models; and Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent (1988) considers long-term changes in classical and postclassical legal doctrine. Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (1999) introduces the relation between law and theology in Islam and Western efforts to analyze both forms of knowledge. Professor Johansen is one of three executive editors of Islamic Law and Society, serves on the editorial boards of a number of French and Lebanese periodicals, and has published about 60 articles in international journals.

Gülru Necipoglu,
Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Department of the History of Art and Architecture

Gülru Necipoglu has directed the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture (AKPIA)/Harvard and served on the AKPIA Executive Committee, the ArchNet Executive Committee, the Harvard GSD Joint Committee on Architectural History, and the Harvard Center for Middle East Studies standing committee.

Professor Necipoglu has written several works, including, From International Timurid to Ottoman: A Change of Taste in Sixteenth-Century Ceramic Tiles; Geometric Design in Timurid/Turkmen Architectural Practice: Thoughts on a Recently Discovered Scroll and Its Late Gothic Parallels; The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire; and Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. In addition, Necipoglu has edited several volumes of Muqarnas--Volume XI: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture; Volume XII: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture; and Volume XIII: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World. She has continued her responsibilities as editor of Muqarnas: An Annual on Islamic Visual Culture and Studies in Islamic Art and Architecture: Supplements to Muqarnas and served on the editorial board of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics.

Bernard Septimus,
Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Professor Septimus’ work focuses on medieval Jewish thought and literature, with special emphasis on Spain in the Islamic period there. He has authored Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah and Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, as well as numerous articles. He is currently working on an annotated translation of Maimonides’ Book of Knowledge.