Sarah bin Tyeer
Sarah Bin Tyeer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is a scholar of Arabic literature, adab, Qurʾanic studies, and comparative literature whose research spans classical and modern Arabic languages, literatures, and cultures. Trained as a comparatist and deeply rooted in philology, she identifies foremost as an adabist, embracing the intellectually expansive and interdisciplinary spirit of the premodern Islamicate scholars whose work traversed literature, ethics, aesthetics, history, and the Islamic sciences. Her book The Well-Tempered Reader (UC Press, 2025) provides a new understanding of the term adab, a ubiquitous concept in Arabic literature with many meanings. In Dr. Tyeer’s analysis, adab is more than just a way of writing or the cultivation of moral excellence, as it is often understood. It is rather an ethical way of perceiving, understanding, and living that results from ceaseless critical interaction between the individual and all aspects of his or her social, cultural, natural, and metaphysical environment. Her earlier book The Qurʾan and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) offers a pioneering contribution to Arabic literary theory by developing critical frameworks from within the Islamic intellectual tradition rather than relying exclusively on modern Western paradigms.
