Education

BA '19, Brown University

MA '21, University of Chicago Divinity School

Research Interests

Shiʿism; Sufism; Iranian Studies; Ottoman Studies; Meaning, Belonging, and Sectarianism; Religion and Violence

Arthur's research on the interfaces between theoretical Sufism and embodied practice has been published in the Journal of Sufi Studies (Brill) and presented at the American Academy of Religion. His current work focuses on novel exchanges between Sufi and Shiʿite intellectual traditions and their popularization through Persian and Turkish vernacular literatures between the Mongol and Safavid periods (ca. 1258-1501). 

He is interested in examining the medieval Sufi brotherhoods that promoted “Shiʿa sympathy” across social and cultural boundaries in premodern Islam in terms of the human search for meaning, drawing inspiration from anthropologies of morality and belonging as well as ethnographic theory.  His research also investigates the role that economic and political pressures played in transforming this forgotten landscape of confessional ambiguity into one of sectarian conflict.

Arthur is equally passionate about questions of theory and method in the study of religion, disciplinary boundaries between intellectual and social history, and in what ways continuing the centuries-old practice of "studying Islam" according to Euro-American methods of scholarship can contribute to the humanities and liberal arts situated in global context today.

Publications

"Nearness to the Real: Sainthood as Ontological Proximity in the Thought of Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī." In Journal of Sufi Studies, no. 11 (2022), pp. 1-44.

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī.  Imam Ghazali's Book of Counsels.  Edited by Saad Ansari, Shoaib Shah, Yaseen Christian Andrewsen.  Translated by Aamir Bashir, Arthur Schechter, Imane El-Marzouki, Tarek Alhariri, Yaseen Christian Andrewsen.  London: Turath Publishing, 2021.