I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the History of the Islamic World in the Department of History at the University of Manchester. As a social and intellectual historian in a global and multi-lingual framework, my research focuses on how people in the Middle East, South Asia, and Eurasia experienced and contributed to regional and international debates about sovereignty, citizenship, and religious and social difference during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before moving to Manchester, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School for Global Intellectual History at Freie Universität Berlin, and from 2022 to 2023, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Abdullah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale University Law School. I received my Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2022, and my doctoral dissertation was awarded the 2022 Ab Imperio Prize.

My current book project (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History, 1856-1947, examines the place of South Asia’s Muslims in the global history of minority rights and identity between the Crimean War (1853-56) and the partition of India. At the center of the book is the paradoxical place of Muslims in South Asian polities across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: though colonial India was home to the world’s largest Muslim population, British officials enumerated Muslims as a “political minority” with lasting consequences. Conventional historiography argues that Muslim thinkers rejected such categorization and sought instead to attain political sovereignty as either a “national majority” or as equal participants in a unified Hindu-Muslim civil nation state. Challenging such narratives, my book argues that Muslim thinkers across North India turned the idea of a minority on its head and utilized it to enable a sweeping set of worldmaking visions through which they imagined social justice and emancipation. Drawing on sources in Urdu, Arabic, Russian, Hebrew, and other languages housed in archives and libraries spanning three continents, the book breaks new ground by arguing that such visions were not merely restricted to the subcontinent but rather, articulated models of religious difference and political empowerment in dialogue with movements and state-building projects across three empires—British, Ottoman, and Tsarist—and the Soviet Union. In so doing, Muslims and the Minority Question shows how Muslim thinkers offered innovative theological, legal, and linguistic alternatives to a colonial politics of enumeration and to homogenizing forms of religious, ethnic, and territorial nationalism. The research for my book has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and other major institutions. In addition, my other research has appeared in journals, including Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Email Address: [email protected]