About

Professor Ali S. Asani holds the position of Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is also a Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, with a joint appointment between NELC and the Study of Religion, and serves on the faculty of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Since beginning his teaching career at Harvard in 1983, he has offered instruction in a variety of languages and has contributed significantly to the study of Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures. His work encompasses a broad range of topics within these fields, reflecting his expertise in religious studies, language, and cultural history.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Archaeology
• Geography
• Literature
• Sociology
• Ancient history
• Religious studies
• Gender studies
• Law

Selected publications

• Living Islam

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <JATS1:p>The story of Islam is not one story, but many stories involving peoples of different races, ethnicities, and cultures. Every religious tradition is marked by internal diversity, manifested through its various communities of interpretation. Islam likewise is multifaceted, as are Muslim life and faith.Living Islaminvites readers to appreciate ways in which Muslims from diverse backgrounds and traditions interpret and experience their faith. Adopting a cultural studies approach, Ali Asani begins by posing questions such as ‘Which Islam?’ and ‘Whose Islam?’, and he considers different conceptions of being Muslim. He then illustrates multidimensional ways in which Muslims relate to the Prophet Muhammad, including as messenger, model, intercessor, and beloved. Drawing on Muslim devotional practices and exploring the Islamic ‘artscape’, he showcases how the beauty of the transcendent can be experienced through sonic, visual and poetic arts.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Localizing Islam in South Asia

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Geography

  India’s rich and diverse folk cultures have played a significant role in determining the nature and character of the Islamic tradition in the Indian subcontinent. They have been particularly influential in shaping the manner in which various Muslim communities have come to understand core Islamic concepts, teachings, and practices through local idioms, such as folk stories and ballads, folk songs, poetry, musical melodies, and festivals. In this regard, India’s folk cultures have been instrumental in the spread of Islamic ideas across the region through complex processes of acculturation. This chapter illustrates these processes by examining representative case studies drawn from India’s diverse regional cultures. It also explores the impact of folk customs and practices on the devotional lives of Indian Muslims such as the celebration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, the martyrdom of his grandson, Imam Ḥusayn, and celebrations of basant or holi, the festival welcoming the advent of spring.

  PublisherDOI

• Front matter

  Journal of Black Religious Thought · 2023-08-07

  paratextOpen access
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• The Gināns

  Routledge eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  This chapter traces the religio-history of the gināns, the devotional poems that constitute the religious and literary heritage of South Asian Nizari Ismaili communities, popularly known as Ismaili Khojas. For several centuries, the gināns have played a central role in daily prayer rituals of the Khojas and functioned as their principal scripture, shaping their world views and determining personal and communal norms. However, over the last 150 years, the contextual and functional relationship of the gināns with the Khojas has been transformed as these communities redefined their identities in response to the imposition of colonial ideologies and structures and the increasingly powerful forces of religiously based nationalisms in South Asia.

  PublisherDOI

• Rumi on Music, Dance, and the Mystical Experience

  Bloomsbury Religion in North America · 2022-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  In this case study, the Sufi concept of sama’ or the extinguishing of ego, or “annihilation of Self,” is introduced with an emphasis on the whirling dervish form of dance performance of the Mevlevi order in medieval Turkey as founded by Jalal ad-Din Rumi (d.1273) and expressed in his poetry in the Mathnawi, a six-volume poem. The debate or diversity of opinions over music and dance in Islam is introduced as is the mystical path of inner-experience, whereby an initiate explores overcoming false dualisms between the real and ideal, or earthly and divine, with the help of an inspired or expert teacher, sometimes called a shaykh or wise elder or spiritual guide.

  PublisherDOI

• IMPROVING THE STATUS OF WOMEN THROUGH REFORMS IN MARRIAGE CONTRACT LAW:

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2022-10-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• In Praise of Muḥammad:

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• 10 Transmitting and Transforming Traditions: Salman Ahmad and Sufi Rock 259

  2019-03-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Historically, South Asia’s many literary traditions have provided both the structure and the idiom for Muslims across a broad spectrum of ideological persuasions to express and transmit their ideas. As is well known, Sufis affiliated with different tariqas have commonly employed genres of vernacular folk poetry as a means of elucidating and popularizing mystical ideas. Over the last century, thanks to a variety of intricately related set of factors such as the revolution in media technology, globalization and the spread of popular western culture and the rise of religiously based nationalisms, the form, content and context of South Asian Muslim devotional expressions have been radically transformed. This chapter explores the emergence of Sufi Rock, a new genre of Muslim devotional expression that has become increasingly popular in South Asia, particularly Pakistan. A genre which fuses western rock music with traditional Sufi poetry and imagery, Sufi Rock is commonly associated with one of its earliest exponents, Salman Ahmad, a guitarist and vocalist in one of South Asia’s biggest rock band, Junoon. The chapter explores Salman’s role in the emergence of Sufi Rock, specifically with reference to his professional development as a musician and spiritual development as a Muslim who deeply identifies with Sufism.

  PublisherDOI

• 10. At the Crossroads of Indic and Iranian Civilizations: Sindhi Literary Culture

  2019-12-31 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Foreword

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2018-12-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It is a great privilege and honor for me to write a foreword to this volumean innovative exploration of the relationship between the aural/sonic arts and the visual/spatial arts in Muslim societies.Comprising contributions from scholars working in an array of disciplines, the collection examines how the sonic arts, such as music, shape and are shaped by the physical spaces in which they are performed.In so doing, it provides us with new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between various forms of art in cultural, sociopolitical, and religious spaces.More important, the volume's essays demonstrate how a multisensory approach-one that combines sound with built structure, music with architecture, time with space-can lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Muslim cultures.Professor Mohammed Arkoun, the influential Arab intellectual, often called for audacious, free, and productive thinking about Islam and indeed Islamicate civilizations.He writes that our understandings of Islam as a religious phenomenon are woefully inadequate since we do not pay sufficient attention to a crucial element: "silent Islam."He defines "silent Islam" as "the Islam of true believers who attach more importance to the religious relationship with the absolute of God than to the vehement demonstrations of political movements."1Instead of focusing on this aspect, Professor Arkoun argues, scholarly discussions about Islam are monopolized by sociopolitical ideologies, such as Islamic revivalism.These, he claims, are in reality secular movements "disguised by religious discourse, rites, and collected behaviors."2Given Professor Arkoun's definition of "silent Islam," we may posit that these ideologies and their discourses of power, orthodoxy, and hege-

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Frequent coauthors

• Syed Akbar Hyder

  Health Affairs

  4 shared

• Annemarie Schimmel

  4 shared

• Sudipta Kaviraj

  3 shared

• Carney E. S. Gavin

  2 shared

• Christian W. Troll

  2 shared

• Samina Quraeshi

  2 shared

• M. Hakan Yavuz

  2 shared

• Azim Nanji

  Aga Khan University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Middle Eastern Studies

  Harvard University

  1983

Awards & honors

• Harvard Foundation medal for outstanding contribution to int…