Aurangzeb Haneef
Assistant Professor and Director of the Study of Religion (2024–2027)
 

My primary research explores the intellectual history of Qurʾānic interpretation in the Formative and Classical periods of Islam. My work examines how Muslims have interpreted, transmitted, and contested the meaning of the Qurʾān across changing historical contexts. Along with Qurʾānic Exegesis (tafsīr), I pay particular attention to ḥadīth transmission, historiography, and manuscript culture. My doctoral work on the 8th-century Muslim scholar, Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 778 CE), and a unique manuscript containing exegetical reports on his authority, speaks to this interest and expertise. I am currently working to convert my Ph.D. thesis into a book. 

Building on this foundation in the early period, I also investigate the movement of exegetical texts and their meanings across temporal and spatial landscapes into the modern period. I have become increasingly interested in tafsīr as a battlefield for Islamic revival and reform, where responses to modernity, in general, and colonialism, injustice, nationalism, identity, ethics, and gender, in particular, are fought out. 

My special interests in Religious Environmental Ethics and Religious Conflict and Peacebuilding provide me with two vantage points to analyze how Muslim scholars have responded to these concerns through Qurʾānic Exegesis in the modern period. My ongoing research into the Environmental Ethics of Mawlana Wahiduddin Khan (d. 2024) and Islamic Liberation Theology help me observe and understand the contours of Muslim responses to these modern-day concerns through Qurʾānic interpretation.

Education

• Ph.D., Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2022
  Thesis: “The Tafsīr of Sufyān al-Thawrī (d. 161/778): A study of its provenance, sources, methods, and topics”

• Master of Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School, 2009 (Islamic Studies)

• International M.A. in Peace, Conflict, and Development Studies, Universitat Jaume I / University of Innsbruck, 2007
  Thesis: “Religion and Peacebuilding: Nonviolence and Use of Force in Islam”

Courses Taught

• SS-101: Islamic Studies (core)

• REL-235: Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding

• REL-362/HIST-337: Qurʾān and Its Interpreters: Between Text and Context

• REL-363: Jihād: Religion and Warfare in the Islamicate Context

Planned course offerings: Interpreting the Qurʾān in the Modern Age; The Sacred Nature: Religion and Ecology; Theologies of Liberation: Justice in World Religions; The Prophetic Word: Ḥadīth in Context

Academic and Other Links

• ORCID

• Academia.edu

• Blog: Tot Batot

• Photography: @AurangzebH

• X: @AurangzebHaneef