People Biography

Dr. Usaama al-Azami is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the College of Islamic Studies. He earned his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, his ʿālimiyya at the Al-Salam Institute, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

His interests lie in Islamic intellectual history, with a particular focus on diachronic transformations in Islamic political thought. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. He is currently working on a monograph project that explores the question of takfir or excommunication and its diachronic developments from early Islam to modernity.

Dr. Al-Azami's PhD thesis, the chapters of which he is preparing for publication, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-first Centuries." In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism, and the nation-state, selectively adapting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understandings of Islam. Dr. Al-Azami's broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam up to the present.