Student Spotlight: Shabbir Agha Abbas

Spotlight on: Shabbir Agha Abbas

Shabbir Agha Abbas, a graduate student at Columbia University (MEI/MESAAS) working on Islamic Law and Shari’a Studies. Shabbir holds an MA in Religious Studies from Rutgers University and has been involved in the Muslim World Manuscript project, helping to catalog and describe manuscripts in the RBML collection.

His research focuses on the intellectual development of Shi’ism in general, but more specifically on how Shi’i intellectual developments in Najaf and Karbala (Iraq) traveled and took hold in other geographic areas, such as North India. In particular, he focuses on the works of a number of late 18th century Shi’i scholars who trained in Iraq and traveled to North India, e.g. Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī Naqawī Naṣīrābādī (d. 1235/1820). Naṣīrābādī is notable for writing important polemical works that led to the alignment of North Indian Twelver Shi’ism with the dominant Uṣūlī tradition of Najaf and Karbala; he wrote Asās al-Uṣūl as a rejoinder against the Akhbārīs of North India, as well as al-Shihāb al-Thāqib against pro-Ṣūfī Twelvers. He has examined these texts, and recently photographed the latter text at the British Library, in hopes of working on a critical edition in the near future.

Shabbir recently published a post on Hazine about his experience conducting research at Al-Imam al-Hakim Public Library in the seminary city of Najaf.