Jamal J. Elias

Jamal J. Elias specializes in Islamic thought, literary and visual culture as well as history in Western and South Asia. His current research focuses on processes and understandings of religious community formation from the medieval to the modern world, as demonstrated in historical and literary writing as well as in visual and material culture. His most recent book, After Rumi: Language, Kinship and the Making of a Religious Community, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press; in addition, his edited volume entitled Beyond the Rose and the Nightingale: What makes Islamic Literature Islamic? is forthcoming from UPenn Press. He is also the lead investigator on a project entitled "Art and Islam in Society: Aesthetic Cognition Expanding Religious Meaning," funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. Elias regularly teaches courses in his areas of specialization, on Islam and modernity and on comparative religion, as well as advanced graduate courses in Sufism, Religion and Visual Culture, Qur'anic Studies, and in Persian and Turkish religious literature. He is the author of Alef is for Allah: Childhood, Emotion and Visual Culture in Islamic Societies (California 2018); Aisha's Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam (Harvard 2012); On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity and Culture in Pakistan (Oneworld 2011); This is Islam: From Muhammad and the Community of Believers to Islam in the Global Community (Prentice Hall 2011);The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ‘Ala’ ad-dawla as-Simnani (SUNY 1995);  the coauthor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (California 2001); the editor and translator of Death Before Dying: Sufi Poems of Sultan Bahu (California 1998); the editor of Key Themes for the Study of Islam (Oneworld 2010); the coeditor of Light Upon Light: A Festschrift presented to Gerhard Böwering by His Students (Brill 2019); and the author of numerous articles. His writings have been translated into at least nine languages.