Ahmad
Khan
Profile
Ahmad Khan’s 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’.
Khan received his DPhil from the University of Oxford, Faculty of Oriental Studies, where he also completed his MPhil. He currently serves on the editorial board at Gorgias Press for its book series on Islamic History and Thought, as well as the editorial board of the journal Philological Encounters (Brill).
Khan joined The American University in Cairo (AUC) as an assistant professor in 2018. Prior to AUC, he worked at Oxford and Hamburg universities. In 2022, he was appointed the Arcapita visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.
At AUC, Khan teaches courses and supervises master's student research on Islamic studies and civilizations, as well as Arabic and Persian texts.
-
Books
- Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to the Eleventh Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
- A. Khan and E. Kendall (eds.), Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016; paperback reissue 2018).
Articles (peer-reviewed)
- An Empire of Elites: Mobility in the Early Islamic Empire, in S. Heidemann and H. Lena-Hagemann (eds.), Connecting the Early Islamic Empire: Transregional and Regional Elites (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2020), 147-69.
- Dispatches from Cairo to India: Editors, Publishing Houses, and a Republic of Letters, Journal of Islamic Studies, 31:2 (2020), 226-55.
- Islamic Tradition in an Age of Print: Editing, Printing, and Publishing the Classical Heritage, in Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016; paperback reissue 2018), 52-100.
Book Reviews
- Review of A. Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Faḍā’il-i Balkh. Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, 98:2 (2021), 570-2.
- Review of T. d’Haubert and A. Papas, Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, CA. 9th/15th-14th/20th Century. The Muslim World Book Review, 41:1 (2020), 42-46.
- Review of T. Bernheimer, The ʿAlids: The First Family of Islam, 750-1200. Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, 95:1 (2018), 201-5.
-
- Introduction to the study of Islam
- Religion and politics in Islam
- Islamic law and society
- Hadith learning in the Islamic world
- Death in Islam and Islamic societies
- Heresy and orthodoxy in Islam
- Readings in classical Persian texts
-
- Philology and Qur'anic readings in the 8th-9th centuries
- Islamic Law and Society, 10th-11th centuries
- Hadith Learning in Medieval Islam
- The History of the Shāfiʿī school in the Middle Periods
- Medieval Islamic social and religious history
- Orthodoxy, heresy, and rebellion
- Early Islamic empire, eighth to tenth centuries
- Islamic law and legal history
- Hadith learning in Khurasan and Transoxiana
- Printing and publishing houses in the Islamic world, 19th-21st centuries
