Asad Q. Ahmed

Ahmed studied philosophy and literature at Yale University, from which he graduated in 2000.[3] He received his doctorate from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 2007.[3]

Ahmed is a member of the advisory board of a number of international journals and book series, including the Islamic History and Thought Series (Gorgias Press),[7] the Journal of Religion and Politics,[8] Mantık araştırmaları dergisi,[9] The Manchester Journal of Transregional Islamic Law and Practice,[10] al-Mukhatabat, Aestimatio New Series, and Oxford Studies in Islamic Philosophy.[11]

His main research interests are in Islamic social history, particularly the study of early Islamic tribal politics, and the rationalist disciplines in Islam, particularly logic, philosophy, legal theory, and astronomy.[12][13] In the latter field, he has made contributions to the investigation of the logic and natural philosophy of Avicenna and of the development of this tradition in postclassical Islam.[14][15] For the post-classical tradition, his general geographical focus is South Asia.[12]

Ahmed is the co-editor of several scientific journals in Arabic and Islamic Studies and South Asian Studies, such as Oriens and Journal of South Asian Intellectual History.[16][17] He also serves as the co-editor of the book series, Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship and Cambridge Series in South Asian Intellectual History.[1][18]

His scholarship has been reviewed and quoted in numerous scientific journals and monographs.[14] In 2014, his book, The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz: Five Prosopographical Case Studies was reviewed by the Journal of the American Oriental Society.[19] In 2015, it was reviewed by the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.[20]

He has received a number of recognitions and awards for his scholarship.

In 2008, he was a recipient of a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.[21]

In 2010, he was awarded the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars, Graeco-Arabic Rationalism in Islamic Traditionalism and also received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.[22][23]

In 2017, he was named as a Burkhardt fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.[24][12]

He has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and is an elected life fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.[25] He has twice been a Fulbright scholar, i.e. Egypt in 2005 and India in 2010.[26][27]

He has lectured internationally in his field, including the Distinguished Lecture at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, and the Kamel Lecture at the Yale Law School.[15][28] He has appeared in public media as a commentator, including NPR and OpenDemocracy, on matters related to Islam and its intellectual history.[29][30]

• The Islamic Scholarly Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
• The Hashiya and Islamic Intellectual History. Oriens Special Issue, 2013.
• Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
• Studies in Postclassical Islamic Philosophy. Oriens Special Issue, 2014.
• Rationalist Disciplines in Postclassical Islamic Legal Theories. Oriens Special Issue, 2018.