About

I am an historian and University Lecturer at Leiden University, where I study religious, philosophical, and intellectual traditions of the Near East of the period 500-1500 with special attention on Islam and Muslims.

At present I am the Cook-Crone Fellow in Ancient and Medieval History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.

My research follow three independent but sometimes overlapping trajectories :

(i) The intellectual and religious origins of Islam and its early development in the periods of Late Antiquity and medieval times, using both diachronic and synchronic approaches. My primary concern is to locate the earliest layers of Islam in their Late Antique epistemic spaces.

(ii) Shiʿi Islam. I am interested in Shiʿi intellectual traditions and religious and philosophical literature in medieval times (especially under the Umayyads and ʿAbbasids).

(iii) Arabic philosophy especially metaphysics and the philosophy of the soul in the writings of Avicenna (d. 1037) and his later admirers and detractors, and Islamic theological traditions (kalām), both Twelver Shiʿi and Sunni Ashʿari.

For a list of my publications, visit my Academia.edu page here.

Last Updated 11 July 2021.