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Shahzad Bashir
Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies

Biography

Professor Shahzad Bashir specializes in Islamic Studies with his primary interests in the intellectual and social history of Persianate Islamic Societies (ca. 1300-1600). He joined Stanford's Department of Religious Studies in September 2007.  He teaches courses on various topics in Islamic Studies and the study of religions in general.

Bashir has published on numerous topics, ranging between Sufism, Shi'ism, and history and historiography in Islamic societies from the medieval period to the present. His current major project, for which he has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is entitled Persianate Pasts: Memory, Narration, and Ideology in the Islamic East, 1400-1600.

Key Works

• Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands. Co-edited with Robert D. Crews. Harvard University Press. In progress, 2012.
• Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam. Columbia University Press, 2011.
• Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis.  Oneworld Publications, 2005.
• Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Prof. Bashir in the News

• Scholar Explores Islamic History through Study of Romantic Poetry
  The Human Experience, June, 2011
• Bold prophetic claims in history
  Jakarta Post, December 10, 2007
• Pursuing the Secret History of a Hat: Visions and Discourses of a Sixteenth-Century Iranian Sufi
  Carleton College: Laurence McKinley Gould Library, May 15, 2007
• Islam in the Modern World
  Minnesota Humanities Center, December 27, 2004