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Bruce Lawrence | |
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| Born | August 14, 1941 Newton, New Jersey, U.S. [1] |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | History of Islam |
| Institutions | Duke University |
Bruce Bennett Lawrence (born August 14, 1941) is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke University. He has taught at Duke since 1971.
A graduate of Fay School and Princeton University, with a Master of Divinity from Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA), he earned his doctorate at Yale University in History of Religions. There he was trained to engage West Asia (aka the Middle East) and South Asia, with particular reference to the cultures and languages, the history and religious practices marked as Muslim. But he also concerns himself with the non-Muslim religious traditions of Asia, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, at the same time that he pursues the turbulent reconnections of Europe to Asia forged in colonial, then post-colonial encounters.
His early books explored the intellectual and social history of Asian Muslims. Shahrastani on the Indian Religions (1976) was followed by Notes from a Distant Flute (1978), The Rose and the Rock (1979) and Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology (1984).
Since the mid-1980s, he has been concerned with the interplay between religion and ideology. The test case of fundamentalism became the topic of his award-winning monograph, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (1989/1995). A parallel but more limited enquiry informed his latest monograph, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence (1998/2000). It is the thorny issue of religious pluralism and diasporic communities that guide his monograph on Asian religions in America (Columbia University Press, November 2002). New Faiths/Old Fears concerns Asian religions in America, especially since 1965; it examines the challenge of their spiritual practices to North American norms and values.
He has also written three collaborative works with colleagues from the Triangle area. The first, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Contesting Islamicate India, was edited with Professor David Gilmartin of North Carolina State University, and published by the University Press of Florida in December 2000 (with an Indian edition in September 2002). The other was co-written with Professor Carl Ernst of the University of North Carolina. Sufi Martyrs to Love: The Chishti Brotherhood in South Asia and Beyond, was published from Palgrave Press, also in November 2002.
Most recently, with his Duke colleague and spouse, Dr. Miriam Cooke of Asian and African Languages and Literatures, he has co-edited Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, published in March 2005 from UNC Press in a series that he also co-edits, with Professor Ernst, on Islamic civilization and Muslim Networks.
Hindutva is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. The political ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
Political Islam is seen by some as any interpretation of Islam as a source of political identity and action. It can refer to a wide range of individuals or groups who advocate the formation of state and society according to their understanding of Islamic principles. It may also refer to use of Islam as a source of political positions and concepts. Not all forms of political activity by Muslims are discussed under the rubric of political Islam, Political Islam can represent one aspect of the Islamic revival that began in the 20th century. Most academic authors use the term Islamism to describe the same phenomenon or use the two terms interchangeably. There are new attempts to distinguish between Islamism as religiously based political movements and political Islam as a national modern understanding of Islam shared by secular and Islamist actors.
Bassam Tibi, is a Syrian-born German political scientist and professor of international relations specializing in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to West Germany in 1962, where he later became a naturalized citizen in 1976.
Timothy John Winter, also known as Abdal Hakim Murad, is an English academic, theologian and Islamic scholar who is a proponent of Islamic neo-traditionalism. His work includes publications on Islamic theology, modernity, and Anglo-Muslim relations, and he has translated several Islamic texts.
Usha Sanyal is an Indian scholar and historian of Islam specializing in the Barelvi movement. She was a visiting assistant professor of history at Wingate University in North Carolina.
Paul J. Griffiths is an English-born American theologian. He was the Warren Professor of Catholic Thought at Duke Divinity School.
Marshall Goodwin Simms Hodgson, was an Islamic studies academic and a world historian at the University of Chicago. He was chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought in Chicago.
Michael Anthony Sells is John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature in the Divinity School and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Michael Sells studies and teaches in the areas of Qur'anic studies, Sufism, Arabic and Islamic love poetry, mysticism, and religion and violence.
Carl W. Ernst is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was also the founding director (2003-2022) of the UNC Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies.
Talal Asad is a Saudi-born cultural anthropologist who is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His prolific body of work mainly focuses on religiosity, Middle Eastern studies, postcolonialism, and notions of power, law and discipline. He is also known for his writing calling for an anthropology of secularism. His work has had a significant influence beyond his home discipline of anthropology. As Donovan Schaefer writes:
The gravitational field of Asad’s influence has emanated far from his home discipline and reshaped the landscape of other humanistic disciplines around him.
Qamar-ul Huda is an American religious scholar.
Omid Safi is an Iranian-American professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He was the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center from July 2014 to June 2019 and was a columnist for On Being. Safi specializes in Islamic mysticism (Sufism), contemporary Islamic thought and medieval Islamic history. Before joining Duke University, Safi was a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was on faculty at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion from 1999 - 2004.
Muzaffar Alam is the George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany. He has taught anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University and the University of Pennsylvania. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.
Lamin Sanneh was the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and Professor of History at Yale University.
Richard Foltz is a Canadian historian who specializes in the history of Iranian civilization — sometimes referred to as "Greater Iran". He has also been active in the areas of environmental ethics and animal rights.
William Albert Graham Jr. is an American scholar of Islamic studies and the history of religion, the Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, emeritus, and University Distinguished Service Professor, emeritus, at Harvard University.
Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame with appointments in the Department of History and in the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. He is co-director of the Contending Modernities program at Notre Dame. He was previously Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is considered a leading scholar of contemporary Muslim thought. Moosa has been named as one of the top 500 Influential Muslims in the World.
Itzchak Weismann is an Israeli historian and full professor in the Department of the History of the Middle East at Haifa University. He was director of the Jewish-Arab Center in 2010-2013 and a member of the university Senate in 2012–2014. Weismann's work focuses on modern Islam and his research interests include the Salafis, the Muslim Brothers and the Sufis in the Middle East and South Asia, religious preaching and interfaith dialogue. He is scientific editor of the Crescent Series of Islamic Thought of Resling Press and a board member of the Journal of Sufi Studies. His photo exhibition Travels in the World of Islam has been displayed in various places since 2014.
Daniel L. Overmyer was a Canadian historian of religion and academic who was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Asian Studies and the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Overmyer was a pioneer in the study of Chinese popular thought, religion, and culture; popular religious sects of the late traditional and modern periods and their texts; and local rituals and beliefs practiced in villages, especially North China.
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