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Died 17 September 2015, Boston, Massachusetts, United States Books What Is Islam?: The Importanc, Before Orthodoxy: The Sata, Leaping Shadows | ||
Introductory video of dr zahid shahab ahmed wmv
Shahab Ahmed (December 11, 1966 – September 17, 2015) was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto."
Contents
Life
Ahmed's parents were Pakistani doctors. Born in Singapore, he was educated at an English boarding school before studying at International Islamic University Malaysia. After work as a journalist in Afghanistan, he gained a master's degree at the American University in Cairo and his PhD at Princeton University. He was a junior member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2000-2003), and served as a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at Princeton University (2004-2005), Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard University (2005-2014), Higher Education Commission of Pakistan Visiting Scholar at the Islamic Research Institute in Islamabad (2007-2008), and Lecturer on Law and Research Fellow in Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School (2014-2015).
A polyglot who was "master of perhaps 15 languages", Ahmed’s broad field of study was Islamic intellectual history, with a special interest in the Satanic Verses incident and the evaluation of its historicity by Islamic scholars of the medieval period.