Asma Afsaruddin

Asma Afsaruddin is the Class of 1950 Herman B. Wells Professor and a professor of Islamic studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research specializations include the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur’anic hermeneutics, hadith, and gender studies. After she received her PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from Johns Hopkins University, she taught at Harvard University and the University of Notre Dame. She is the author and editor of nine books, including Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2023), Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013), Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and The First Muslims: History and Memory (OneWorld Publications, 2008), which has been translated into Turkish, Malay, and Bosnian. Her research has been funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Research Institute of Turkey, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named her a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2019 she was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in recognition of her academic and professional accomplishments.

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