Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 2009

Research Interests

Ahmed H. al-Rahim joined the Department of Religious Studies in 2009. Before coming to the University of Virginia, he served in the Office of Analysis for Near East and South Asia (INR), U.S. Department of State. His research and teaching focus mainly on Arabic and Islamic religious, intellectual, and philosophical history in the Middle Ages. Professor al-Rahim regularly teaches two undergraduate courses, “Classical Islam” and “Global Islam.” His graduate seminars address topics in Arabic philosophy and theology, qurʾānic exegesis, Islamic ethics, and Arabic literary biography. His publications include “Concupiscent Curiosity of the Gaze in Medieval Islam: Qurʾān 24:30–31,” in Curiositas, eds. A. Speer and R.M. Schneider, Miscellanea Mediaevalia; 42 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 465–80; The Creation of Philosophical Tradition: Biography and the Reception of Avicenna’s Philosophy from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century A.D., Diskurse der Arabistik; 21 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018); “Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture,” in The Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. D. Ganguly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1:80–108; “The Twelver-Šīʿī Reception of Avicenna in the Mongol Period,” in Before and after Avicenna: Proceedings of the First Conference of the Avicenna Study Group, eds. D.C. Reisman† and A.H. al-Rahim, Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science: Texts and Studies; 52 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), 219–32; “Islam and the White House: American Presidential Discourse on Establishing Official Islam, 1993–2013,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 9.1 (2016), 87–122; “Translation as Contemporary Qurʾanic Exegesis: Ahmed Ali and Muslim Modernism in India,” in The Two-sided Canvas: Perspectives on Ahmed Ali, ed. M. Farooqi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 136–50; “Whither Political Islam and the ‘Arab Spring’,” The Hedgehog Review (2011), 8–22; “The Sistani Factor,” Journal of Democracy 16.3 (2005), 50-53; and numerous entries in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, eds. C.M. Furey et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter 2009–) and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 4 Vols., ed. R.E. Bjork (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Currently professor al-Rahim is working on a series of articles on conceptions of the ocular in the Qurʾān and ḥadīth, which is associated with VISIONIS, “Visuality in the Qurʾān and Early Islam,” European Research Council Starting Grant, 2021‒2026, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; “Betwixt and Between: The Historiography of Arabic Philosophy,” a title for the Einstein Center Chronoi book series, “Zeit, Zeitempfinden, Zeitordnungen/Time, Time Awareness, Time Management,” which is supported by a fellowship from the Einstein Stiftung Berlin, 2022, Freie Universität Berlin. In addition, he is completing a primer on the modern ideologies of political Islam.