Board of Advisors
-
Dr. Katherine Bullock
Dr. Katherine Bullock is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, where she also completed her Ph.D. Her teaching focus is political Islam from a global perspective, and her research focuses on Muslims in Canada, their history, contemporary lived experiences, Islamophobia, political and civic engagement, debates on the veil, media representations of Islam and Muslims, and Muslim perspectives on zakat and Basic Income. She was the editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences from 2003 – 2008 and the Vice-President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America from 2006 – 2009.
Her publications include Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves (University of Texas Press), and Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes (International Institute of Islamic Thought), which has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Malayalam, Tamil, and Turkish. Her latest research studies how Canadian Muslim healthcare workers cope with workplace anti-Muslim racism.
She is also a TV host for Sound Vision Foundation’s Muslim News Canada, and the President of Compass Books, dedicated to publishing top-quality books about Islam and Muslims in English. Originally from Australia, she embraced Islam in 1994. -
Dr. Muhammad Ahmad Munir
Dr. Muhammad Ahmad Munir is a scholar of Islamic law, jurisprudence, and Qur’anic studies, currently serving as an Assistant Professor at the Islamic Research Institute (IRI) of the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI). He heads the Department of Qur’anic Studies and is the Editor of Islamic Studies, a SCOPUS-indexed journal of international repute.He holds a PhD and an MA in Islamic Studies from McGill University, Canada, where he also taught courses in Islamic law, Arabic, and Urdu. Prior to that, he earned a B.A. (Hons), MA, and M.Phil. in Islamic Studies from the University of the Punjab. Dr. Munir also received advanced training in Islamic sciences and Arabic at Al-Azhar University and affiliated institutions in Cairo.Dr. Munir has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia and a postdoctoral fellow at the Douglas Research Center in Montreal. His areas of expertise include classical and modern Islamic jurisprudence, therapeutic jurisprudence, fatwa studies, and Qur’anic hermeneutics. He has presented his research at leading institutions including Boston University, New York University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Melbourne.His Urdu monograph Aḥkām-i Nikāḥ (2021) explores classical rulings on Muslim marriage law, and he is co-editor of the Urdu translation of Wahba al-Zuḥaylī’s Al-Fiqh al-Islāmī wa Adillatuhu. He has also published extensively in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Journal of Law & Medicine, Islamic Studies, Fikr-o-Nazar, and Al-Qamar on topics ranging from judicial khulʿ and brain death to Sunni identity formation and interpretive methodologies in Islamic legal theory.
-
Professor Mustapha Sheikh
Dr. Mustapha Sheikh is a scholar specialising in the Shari’a and its ancillary sciences and is the Chair in Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at the University of Leeds (UK).
His travels in pursuit of knowledge have taken him across the Muslim world, including to several historical centres of learning. In Damascus, he received instruction from its leading ‘ulama, including Shaykh Wahbah al-Zuhayli, Shaykh ‘Abdul Qadir Arnaout, Shaykh Rajab Dib and Shaykh Na’im ‘Arqasusi. In Istanbul, he studied tafsir and ‘ilm al-suluk under Shaykh Osman Topbas (Naqshbandi) and Professor Suleman Derin. In Lahore, he received an Ijazah in the transmission of Hadith from Shaykh Professor Sa’d Siddiqui Kandelhvi (University of Punjab). Dr Mustapha has an Ijazah ‘Aliya (Higher License) in Classical Arabic and Islamic Law, having studied at Ma’had al-Fath al-Islami (Damascus, Syria) and the Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines (Wales branch).
Dr. Mustapha combines traditional Islamic training with a distinguished background of academic scholarship at several highly ranked British universities. He has a BSc in Project Management from University College London, a Masters in the Study of Religions from the University of Oxford and a Doctorate in Theology (DPhil/PhD), also from the University of Oxford.He is the author of two books, Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents: Ahmad al-Aqhisari and the Qadizadelis (Oxford University Press) and A Treasury of Ibn Taymiyyah: His Timeless Thought and Wisdom (Kube Publishing).
Dr. Mustapha has an international reputation for scholarship in Islamic commercial law. The interdisciplinary approach developed by him and his colleague, Professor M.S. Ebrahim (Durham University), marks their work apart within the field. Their work on Islamic Finance has been published by the Arab Law Quarterly (Brill). -
Professor Sharif El-Tobgui
Dr. Sharif El-Tobgui holds a BS in Arabic Language from Georgetown University, a Master’s and PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University and currently serves as Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Director of the Arabic Language Program at Brandeis University.
He previously taught for five years at Harvard University as Preceptor of Arabic, and has also taught at the Middlebury College Summer Arabic Language School. Prof. El-Tobgui’s scholarly expertise lies in the field of Islamic thought, with a special concentration on theology, law and jurisprudence.
He is particularly interested in questions concerning the relationship between reason and revelation in the Islamic tradition, and has published on the manifestations of this tension in the fields of classical Islamic jurisprudence and Qur’anic exegesis. He has just completed his first monograph, a study of Ibn Taymiyya’s (d.728/1328 10-volume work, “Refutation of Contradiction Between Reason and Revelation” (E.J. Brill, 2020).
In addition to his expertise in Islamic thought, Prof. El-Tobgui has a deep love of language in general, and of Classical Arabic in particular, and has enjoyed for many years exploring the intricacies of Arabic grammar as well as classical literature and poetry with his students.