Asma Sayeed

Mahdi Visiting Research Fellow (Fall 2017 & Fall 2023)

Asma Sayeed is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Co-Director of the Islamic Studies program at UCLA. Her primary research interests are in early and classical Muslim social history, the history of Muslim education, the intersections of law and social history, and women and gender studies. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (2005). Her first book, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013) analyzes Muslim women’s religious education, specifically their transmission of ḥadīth from the rise of Islam to the early Ottoman period. She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica, Islamic Law and Society, and the Journal of Qurʾanic Studies.

Her current project relates to texts and textual practices in Islamic higher education in diverse regional and historical contexts. This fall, at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, she will be working on her book manuscript, entitled Re-framing Islamic Education: Reform and Authenticity in Contemporary Morocco.