Ahmad Khan

Arcapita Visiting Professor in Modern Arab Studies (Spring 2022)

Ahmad Khan is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations (ARIC). He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies, where he also completed his MPhil. Prior to AUC, he worked at Oxford and Hamburg universities.

His research focuses on four fields of inquiry: heresy and orthodoxy in medieval Islam (8th-11th C.E.); the early Islamic empire (8th-10th C.E.); classical Islamic sciences (hadith, tafsir, sufism, and Islamic law); and print in the Islamic world, (19th-21st C.E.). 

His first monograph, Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to Eleventh Centuries, will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. He is currently writing his second monograph on the relationship between Islamic law, religion, and empire in medieval Khurasan. He has also published articles on Islamic thought in the age of print, which will appear soon in Arabic as al-Islam wa al-Thawra al-Tibaʿiyya fi Misr wa ma wara’. He co-edited the volume Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

As the Arcapita Visiting Professor at Columbia, he is teaching a graduate course on 'Islamic Thought in an Age of Print.'