Aaron Hughes Gästforskare

I am a professor of the History of Religions at the University of Rochester (NY) and a Guest Researcher at Stockholm University courtesy of the Swedish Research Council (VR). My early career was defined by examining relations between Muslims and Jews in the late antique and medieval periods as can be seen, e.g., in my An Anxious Inheritance: Religious Others and the Shaping of Sunnī Orthodoxy. The past five years, however, have witnessed me turn my attention to Islam in northern climes. My Islam: A Canadian Story is the first book-length study of the topic, and I have followed this up with two other more specialized studies: A History of Ismaili Muslims in Canada and Making Islam Canadian: The Country’s First National Muslim Organization.

In addition to my work on Islam, I have an abiding interest in what is sometimes called “theory and method.” Framed in terms of Islamic studies, this involves examining questions such as: how do we study Islam? What are some of the “meta” issues involved in such? A representative work here is my Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity and more recently in my forthcoming Decolonizing Islam: A Critical Intervention.

I have recently begun a new project, that builds on my previous work, tentatively called “Circumpolar Islam,” that examines Muslim communities north of the Arctic Circle.