I am a historian of Islamic thought working across the medieval and modern periods. My research and teaching cover a wide range of topics in Islamic Studies and Religious Studies. My background is in the study of Sufism (Islamic mysticism), specifically the theoretical Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī and his followers, on which I have written two monographs – one on the history of the idea of the ‘perfect human’ (al-insān al-kāmil) in Sufi thought, the other on ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī’s Sufi view of the different prophets, scriptures, and religions. While I continue to do research on Sufism, more recently I have also worked on Islamic law, modern Islamic thought, and the Jewish and Christian study of Islam.

I am currently working on two big research projects: one on major themes in Islamic thought from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and the other on the treatment of music in Islamic legal literature. The first investigates the fundamental values underlying the principal trends in modern Islamic thinking, particularly those of a revivalist character, while the second uses attitudes to music and other forms of ‘amusement’ (lahw in Arabic) as a key to understanding different types of Islamic piety. Besides these projects, I am also working with Ronald Nettler on contemporary Islamic thought: we are looking at how several major Muslim thinkers, predominantly from North African backgrounds, have used classical Islamic thought to advance their own liberal modernist agendas. My approach to all my research centres on the close reading of texts in Arabic and Persian, and I also like to engage in comparative analysis with other religious traditions, especially Jewish and Christian.

I am a big believer in public engagement. In 2021, I published A Short History of Islamic Thought (Head of Zeus / OUP), a general introduction to Islamic intellectual history that was chosen as a Book of the Year in The Spectator and Engelsberg Ideas. I am also one of the co-authors of Iran: Persia: Ancient & Modern (2016), a scholarly travel guide to Iran. In addition to my academic work, I have written for numerous popular publications, including The Daily Telegraph, The Critic, History Today, Engelsberg Ideas, and Antigone. I have also spoken at several literary festivals across the UK and am regularly interviewed about Islam and religion on the TV and radio. I am passionate about widening access to Arabic and Islamic Studies and often speak on Islamic topics at schools. 

I love teaching, especially here at Oxford. I teach papers on Islamic religion to both undergraduates and graduates at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and am very grateful for the opportunity to teach the subject through primary sources in the original languages – a tradition that Oxford has done well to preserve. I also supervise graduate students working on Sufism, Islamic law, and modern Islamic thought, and am happy to receive enquiries from prospective students looking to develop research projects in these areas.

I am a consultant editor of The Journal of Islamic Studies, and a member of the editorial advisory board of The Maghreb Review, the advisory board of the Oxford Interfaith Forum’s Philosophy in Interfaith Contexts programme, and the academic advisory body of the Oxford Pakistan Programme. I am a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College.