We are delighted to welcome our newest Newman Centre member Muhammad Imran Khan, who has joined the Centre as a member of the Academic Advisory Board.
Muhammad Imran Khan joins TCD from the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge where he will soon be submitting his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies: “Sociality and the Mystical Theology of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī”. During his PhD, Imran supervised undergraduates at the Divinity Faculty, Cambridge, and taught the “Islamic Core Sources and Approaches” module at al-Maktoum Higher Education College, Dundee.
Prior to his PhD, Imran worked as a researcher and translator at St Andrews University on the Analytical Database for Arabic Poetry, an ERC funded project. This research experience will assist him to make contributions on the present project. He joined the project at St Andrews after having been sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust to study Hadith and its institutions in Pakistan. His MA was in Islamic Theology at Leiden University where he took modules on Islamic Ethics and Modern Fatwa Institutions, which culminated in a thesis analysing domestic violence through the tafsīr tradition in light of modern debates. His BA was in International Relations at the University of Leeds where his paper for a Critical Theory module on Education and Habermas was published by Roundhouse: A Journal of Critical Theory and Practice.
Imran has also studied in Turkey and pre-war Syria, and has various degrees of fluency in Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Brazilian Portuguese. He also takes a keen interest in pedagogy and has taught in schools in Japan, Turkey, Syria and Brazil.
Imran’s research interests are in applied Abrahamic virtue ethics, Sufism, philosophical theology, epistemology, Hadith and Qur’anic exegeses, pedagogy, conflict resolution and the philosophy and theology of poverty mitigation.
At Trinity, Imran is a research associate in the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Department, in association with Dr Mohamed Ahmed’s ERC project: Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah. He is working on the cultural and educational history of the Egyptian-Jewish community through the Arabic poetry fragments found in the Cairo Genizah.
Imran welcomes invitations to speak on Islam and Muslim-related issues in Ireland as well as internationally.
