Harvard Islamica Podcast

In this far-ranging discussion, Professor Noah Feldman talks to the Alwaleed Program team about his career of over 30 years at Harvard and beyond, from an undergraduate student in NELC to professor at Harvard Law School to advisor on the Iraqi and Tunisian constitutions. He talks about his early interests in Arabic and Islamic philosophy and his former professors and colleagues in Islamic studies at Harvard including Muhsin Mahdi and Shahab Ahmed. After writing multiple books pertaining to Islamic law, Islam and the state, and U.S. constitutional law, he expanded his work into Jewish studies and founded the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at Harvard Law School. Finally, Professor Feldman discusses his recent book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024) and reflects on American Judaism, Zionism, and intercommunal relations between American Muslims and Jews.Noah Feldman is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard Law School, chair of Harvard's Society of Fellows, and Founder and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law. He is the author of many books and articles, including After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (2003), What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (2004), The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (2008), The Arab Winter: A Tragedy (2020), and To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024). Professor Feldman is also a columnist for Bloomberg and host of the podcast, Deep Background with Noah Feldman. Credits and Transcript

Dr. Conor Dube is a winner of the 2025 Alwaleed Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for his dissertation, “Interpreting the Qurʾān in the Islamic West (7th – 11th c.): Tradition and Transformation in Tafsīr.” In this episode, Conor talks about how he came to write the first comprehensive history of tafsīr in the Islamic West (North Africa and al-Andalus), engaging secondary scholarship in Arabic and European languages. He discusses some of the important early exegetes of the region such as Yaḥyā b. Sallām, ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb, Makkī b. Abī Ṭālib, and Aḥmad b. ʿAmmār al-Mahdawī and their approaches; the intellectual traditions of Sunnīs, Ismāʿīlīs, and Ibāḍīs; and the “linguistic turn” of Maghribī tafsīr in the 4th-5th hijrī centuries. Conor highlights that scholars from the Maghrib were highly mobile, traveling, studying, and teaching throughout North Africa, al-Andalus, Egypt, and the East. He also reflects on the relationship between tafsīr in the Islamic East and Islamic West, what has been preserved, what may have been lost, and why.Dr. Conor Dube earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2025 and is now a Research Fellow in North African Medieval History at the University College London Institute of Archaeology.Credits and Transcript

Dr. Hacı Osman (Ozzy) Gündüz is a winner of the 2025 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for his dissertation, "A Rūmī in the Lands of Shām: Life, Poetry, and Legacy of a Janissary-Turned-Poet Māmayya al-Rūmī (d. 985–7 / 1577–9)." Ozzy talks about his interests in Arabic literature during the Ottoman era, often considered a period of inḥiṭāṭ, or decline, in which Arabic literature came to be decadent, imitative, and lacking creativity. Ozzy challenges the decline narrative and conducts a micro-history of Māmayya al-Rūmī, an Arabic poet of non-Arab origin, whose poetry Ozzy analyzes on its own terms and within the context of the literary milieu of 16th century Damascus. Māmayya al-Rūmī's poetry spans a vast range, including panegyrics to rulers and scholars, multi-lingual macaronic poems, chronograms, and "bawdy" poetry on the themes of homoerotic desire, drugs, and the wildly popular new beverage, coffee.Dr. Hacı Osman (Ozzy) Gündüz is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2025. You can follow Ozzy on Academia.edu here and on Instagram @ozzyggozzy.Credits and Transcript

Dr. Armaan Siddiqi is the winner of the 2024 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for her dissertation, "Portrait of a Moroccan ʿālim: Shaykh Muḥammad b. Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s Life, Works, and World (1858 - 1927)." In this episode, Armaan talks about her research on al-Kattani, a traditionally-trained Moroccan Muslim scholar who came from a prominent family of scholars, Sufis, and descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. While scholarship on Islam in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has focused on the Muslim reformers and the Middle East, Armaan's dissertation sheds light on the thought of a conservative scholar from the Maghrib, the “frontier” lands of Islam. Through an exploration of al-Kattani’s works including a hagiography, advice to the sultan, fatwa, travelogue, and theological tract, Armaan shows how a traditional Moroccan scholar navigates religion and politics on the eve of French colonization while remaining faithful to existing traditions and structures of authority.Dr. Armaan Siddiqi earned her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2024. She is a lecturer in Islamic studies and also works in Stanford University Library’s Middle East and South Asia collections. She is currently part of a Harvard digital humanities project mapping the global influence of the 20th century Islamic periodical Al-Manar, published out of Cairo (1898 – 1935).Credits and Transcript

In this episode, Dr. Hussein Rashid talks about his recently published volume, Islam in North America: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2024), which he co-edited with Huma Mohibullah and Vincent Biondo. Hussein discusses his trajectory as a scholar and how beginning his academic career in the post-9/11 world led him to believe in the importance of public-facing and accessible scholarship. The chapters of the book cover a wide range of topics related to Islam in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean and explore themes of race, gender, class, and sexuality, among others. Hussein sheds light on the long and little-known history of Muslims in North America, the changing perception of Muslims in the American imagination, and how Islamophobia/anti-Muslim bias and the racialization of Muslims manifest in the past and present.Dr. Hussein Rashid is a scholar of Islam whose research focuses on Muslims and American popular culture. Hussein earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, focusing on South and Central Asia, at Harvard and has since taught at many universities. Hussein writes and speaks about music, comics, movies, and the blogistan.Credits and transcriptThe Harvard Islamica Podcast has been featured on FeedSpot's lists of Best Harvard Podcasts and Best Islamic Podcasts! Please remember to like, share, and subscribe, and thank you for your support!

In the first podcast episode of our "Climate Change and Muslim Societies" series, Dr. Safouan Azouzi discusses his research on Design for Social Innovation. Design, historically rooted in Eurocentric perspectives tied to capitalism and overconsumption, has contributed significantly to the climate crisis, disproportionately affecting the poor and disadvantaged. Safouan questions how Design, originating from the Global North, can be used by eco-social movements in the Global South as a tool for change that sustains their struggle. His focus is on decolonizing design and integrating it with alternative economics to promote sustainable futures.Safouan examines the impact of extractive capitalism and water issues in Tunisia's oases, where social, ecological, and political factors intersect. His research underscores the urgent need to revive indigenous oasis practices facing imminent collapse. He critiques the concept of "design for the other 90%", arguing it often lacks a political dimension and perpetuates neocolonialism. Social designers, he argues, often overlook the systemic global mechanisms that produce the social problems they aim to solve.In his field research, Safouan studies (among others) the oasis of his hometown, Gabes, Tunisia. Here, traditional commoning practices, especially around water, are disappearing due to state-led groundwater exploitation by the Tunisian Chemical Group. This has led to severe (air and sea) pollution and exacerbated ecological challenges in the region.Dr. Safouan Azouzi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. In 2023-34, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He earned his PhD in Architecture and Design at the Sapienza University in Rome.Credits and transcript

In her recent book, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024), Professor Malika Zeghal shows how Muslim states negotiated the role of Islam in governance in the 19th-21st centuries by exploring the history of constitution making, the impact of religious minorities on debates about Islam and democracy, and state expenditures on Islamic public provisions in the longue durée in Middle Eastern and North African countries. Through her qualitative and quantitative research, Professor Zeghal demonstrates that the modern Muslim state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion has continued from the premodern to the modern period, with vigorous debates as to how it should be implemented.Malika Zeghal is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University.Credits and transcript

Dr. Shiraz Hajiani's research contributes to the scant scholarship on the early Nizari Ismaili community. After a succession crisis in the Fatimid Empire in 1095 divided the Ismailis, the community in Iran accepted the crown-prince, Nizar, as the legitimate Imam and successor to the Imam-Caliph al-Mustanṣir and established a polity in Iran at the fortress of Alamut. While the Nizaris, in Shiraz's view, did not write history qua history, he utilizes of a handful of Nizari doctrinal treatises such as the Ḥikāyat-i Sayyid Nāṣir-i Khusraw and Ilkhanid-era chronicles written by Sunni court-historians hostile toward the Nizaris to shed light on the founder of the polity at Alamut, Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ, the event of the Qiyāma declared by Ḥasan ʿalā dhikrihiʾl-salām in 1164, and the Nizaris' relations with the Saljuqs and Mongols. Through his novel reading of the limited sources and use of the digital humanities, Shiraz uncovers important developments in the early history of this Shiʿī community usually relegated to a subaltern status in scholarship despite its important role in Islamicate intellectual and political history.Dr. Shiraz Hajiani is Alwaleed Bin Talal Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and Research Associate in Transcendence and Transformation at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2019. His forthcoming book is The Life and Times of Our Master: A Biography of Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ. More information about Shiraz’s work can be found at his website, islamicate.net.Credits and transcript

In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once known as Little Syria. Through the study of property maps, newspapers, oral history interviews, and immigration records, Chloe and Lydia have uncovered the story of this diasporic community from today’s Syria and Lebanon and added both to our understanding of Ottoman immigration to the United States and the history of Boston. The resulting public history project now includes walking tours of Little Syria, an article in both English and Arabic, an exhibit, and a digital humanities project.Dr. Lydia Harrington is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. She earned her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University.Dr. Chloe Bordewich is Public History Postdoctoral Associate at the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. She earned her PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University.Learn more:Boston Little Syria Project"Boston's Little Syria: The Rise and Fall of a Diasporic Neighborhood" by Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington in al-JumhuriyaAnton AbdelahadCredits, transcript, and photos

Dr. Janan Delgado is the winner of the 2022 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies for her dissertation entitled, "The Ties That Bind: Child Custody in Andalusī Mālikism, 3rd/9th to 6th/12th c." While scholars of Islamic law have produced numerous studies on marriage and divorce in recent decades, the topic of ḥaḍāna, or child custody, has received scant scholarly attention until now. In this longitudinal study of Mālikī legal texts including the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Mālik b. Anas, Mudawwana of Saḥnūn, Kitāb al-kāfī of Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Bayān wa-l-taḥṣīl and the Muqaddimāt of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, and fatāwā, Janan uncovers fascinating legal and social history of family dynamics in al-Andalus. Her analysis reveals the jursts' notions of womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, step-fatherhood, and childhood and shows subtle shifts that occurred over time, including how the Mālikī jurists responded to intellectual, political, and social challenges.Dr. Janan Delgado is a scholar of Islamic law. She holds a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University.Credits and transcript