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. In addition to my ongoing scholarly work, I actively bring my research into public debate by contributing articles to Haaretz and appearing in broadcast media, including BBC Radio 4.

The main focus of my research is how Muslim thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reimagined sovereignty, belonging, and the protection of vulnerable populations across the Ottoman Arab provinces, British India, the Russian Empire, and their successor states. Drawing on Arabic, Urdu, Russian, Persian, Hebrew, and Turkic sources from a range of archives and libraries, I show how these thinkers navigated imperial efforts to sort peoples into “majorities” and “minorities,” criticized the language of international law, and advanced alternative visions of difference, protection, and political community. Forged in the push and pull among rival imperial centers, and later among their post-imperial successors, my research reveals Muslim thinkers as architects, not just subjects, of some of the key political ideas of our time. My current book project, Muslims and the Minority Question: A Global History, 1856–1947 (under contract with the University of Chicago Press, expected 2027) reflects my current research interests. It offers a transimperial history of the idea of “minority” from the Crimean War (1853-56) to the partition of India and the UN vote on Palestine. Rather than treating Muslim intellectuals as simply rejecting minority status or seeking inclusion in secular national citizenship, the book argues that they reworked “minority” into a critical vocabulary grounded in egalitarian readings of Islamic thought. They used this vocabulary to articulate universal rights and ethical obligations and to challenge colonial governance and emergent majoritarian politics. The project thus reframes the history of one of the most consequential political ideas of the modern era, showing how Muslim intellectual networks that linked Cairo, Jerusalem, Delhi, Lucknow, Moscow and beyond were central to global debates on pluralism, sovereignty, and the limits and possibilities of international law. My other research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 

Email Address: [email protected]