Arafat A. Razzaque

I am a historian of the medieval Middle East, with a focus on religion, society and culture in the early Abbasid period, from roughly the 8th to 10th centuries CE. I received my PhD (2020) in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. I also studied at Harvard Divinity School for the M.T.S. in Islamic Studies, and did my undergraduate (B.A. in Humanities) at Yale University. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, I served as a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.

I currently work mainly with early Islamic traditionist literature and related texts. My first book project examines etiquettes of speech (ādāb al-lisān) and ideas about gossip and sin in pietist traditions of the so-called Zuhd movement and other sources such as homiletic ḥadīth, ritual law, and exegesis. I attempt to situate these discourses in the social and intellectual context of early Muslim society and in terms of late antique asceticism, especially the teachings of the Desert Fathers. I have thus become attentive to intertextuality in these Arabic sources and their reappropriation of Jewish and Christian wisdom literature, aphorisms, and apocalyptic visions.

My work is driven by a broader fascination with the norms of mundane life and public morality, as well as an engagement with current scholarship in cultural studies. I am pursuing further research on notions of scholarly propriety among the medieval ʿulamāʾ, as evident through biographical dictionaries and belletristic sources. Among other subjects, I also retain an interest in book history and have written about the Thousand and One Nights and its reception in early modern Europe. I teach courses at U of T on the history of the Caliphate and the Islamicate world at large, religious conversion in medieval history, the Sufi tradition, and other topics.