Travels in Islamic Timespace
Shahzad Bashir is the Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and an Andrew F. Carnegie Fellow during the academic year 2015-16.
He specializes in Islamic Studies with a particular interest in the intellectual and social histories of Persianate societies of Iran and Central and South Asia circa fourteenth century CE to the present. His published work studies Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements originating in Islamic contexts, representation of corporeality in hagiographic texts and Persian miniature paintings, religious developments during the Timurid and Safavid periods, and modern transformations of Islamic societies.
Bashir is currently at work on a book entitled Islamic Times: Conceptualizing Pasts and Futures which is to be a wide-ranging treatment that critiques the way Islamic history has been conceptualized in modern scholarship and suggests alternatives, with emphasis on the multiplicity of temporal configurations found in Islamic materials.
His publications include Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (2011), Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (2005), and Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (2003).
Professor Bashir's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.