Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA with appointments in the Department of History and the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. Before teaching at Notre Dame, he taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University 2001-2014 and at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town in his native South Africa 1989-1998. Between 1998-2001 he taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. His interests span classical and modern Islamic thought with special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics, and theology. His forthcoming book, What is a Madrasa? is scheduled for publication. He wrote Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006) and is editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism. He was named Carnegie Scholar in 2005 to pursue research on the madrasas, Islamic seminaries of South Asia. He earned his MA (1989) and PhD (1995) from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to that he took the ‘alimiyyah degree in Islamic and Arabic studies from Darul ‘Ulum Nadwatul ‘Ulama, one of India’s foremost Islamic seminaries in the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. He holds a BA degree from Kanpur University and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the City University in London.
