Asad Ahmed

Asad Q. Ahmed is the Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Professor Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and pre-modern Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, legal theories, and astronomy. His books include The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz (University of Oxford, 2011), Avicenna’s Deliverance:  Logic (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Palimpsests of Themselves:  Logic and Commentary in Muslim India (University of California Press, 2022).  He is also the co-editor of several collected volumes, including The Islamic Scholarly Tradition (Brill, 2010), The Hashiya and Islamic Intellectual History (Oriens, special issue, 2013), Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts (Brill, 2015), Rationalist Disciplines in Postclassical Islam Oriens, special issue, 2014), and Rationalist Disciplines and Postclassical Islamic Legal Theories (Oriens, special issue, 2018).  He has published numerous articles in the aforementioned fields.  His general training includes Graeco-Arabica, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, and hadith and Qur'anic Studies.

Professor Ahmed is the co-editor of the Berkeley Series in Postclassical Islamic Scholarship (UC Press), The Cambridge Series in South Asian Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press), and of the journals Oriens (Brill) and The Journal of South Asian Intellectual History (Brill).  He also serves on the advisory board of several international journals and book series.  His awards include fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  He has also held appointments as a Term Chair at the EHESS, Paris and Leverhulme Professor at the University of Cambridge.  He is Life Fellow of Clare Hall, the University of Cambridge.