Ebrahim Moosa

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Ebrahim E.I. Moosa is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in Duke University's Department of Religion and Associate Director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center.

Moosa earned his `alimiyya degree in Islamic and Arabic studies from Darul Uloom Nadwatul `Ulama, one of India's foremost Islamic seminaries in the city of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. He also has a BA degree from Kanpur University, and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the City University in London. He earned his MA (1998) and Ph.D. (1995) from the University of Cape Town.

As a journalist he wrote for Arabia: The Islamic World Review, MEED (Middle East Economic Digest) and Afkar/Inquiry magazines in Britain, and later became political writer for the Cape Times in South Africa.

He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) that won the 2006 American Academy of Religion Best First Book Prize in the History of Religions. He is also editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000).

Previously he taught at the University of Cape Town's Department of Religious Studies in his native South Africa till 1998 and was visiting professor at Stanford University prior to joining Duke in 2001.

Moosa's interests are in Islamic thought, with a special focus on Islamic law, ethics and critical theory. Moosa examines the way religious traditions encounter modernity and in the process generating new conceptions of history, culture and ethics.

Currently he is working on a book titled, Inside Madrasas and another one called Between Right and Wrong: Debating Muslim Ethics. In these works he explores some of the major challenges that confront a tradition-in-the making in the realm of ethics and a commentary on the state of traditional Islamic education on the Indian subcontinent.

Moosa serves on several distinguished international advisory boards and is associated with some of the foremost thinkers, activists and role-players in the Muslim world and beyond. He advised the first independent government after apartheid on Islamic affairs and serves on committees of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in addition to others. He also has extensive experience in human rights activities. He was named Carnegie Scholar for 2005 and received support to pursue research and write a book about the religious seminaries, madrasas in the Muslim world.

Currently he is directing a Ford Foundation-funded project titled, "Mapping Knowledge, Shaping Muslim Ethics" at the Center for the Study of Muslim Networks that he directs.

Professor Moosa's unique approach is to combine the best of traditional Islamic studies with the latest theories of interpretation. This is quite visible in his book, Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination.