Ebrahim Moosa

Biography

Ebrahim Moosa (Ph.D. University of Cape Town 1995) is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and in Notre Dame’s Department of History.

Professor Moosa also is a senior faculty member in the Keough School of Global Affairs, helping to lead the School's new initiative in Global Religion and Human Development.

Moosa co-directs, with Scott Appleby and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, the global research and education initiative examining the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and other religious and secular forces in the world. Moosa came to Notre Dame in the fall of 2014 from Duke University, where he taught in the Department of Religious Studies for 13 years. He previously taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town (1989-1998) and in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University (1998-2001).

Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006) and editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism.

In 2005 Moosa was named a Carnegie Scholar to pursue research on Islamic seminaries of South Asia. His book What Is a Madrasa? was published in March 2015 by the University of North Carolina Press.

His publications also include the co-edited book The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring (Georgetown University Press, 2015); Islam in the Modern World (Routledge, 2014) and, Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Challenges, (Amsterdam University Press, Spring, 2010).

Born in South Africa, Moosa earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Cape Town. Prior to that he earned a degree in Islamic and Arabic studies from Darul Ulum Nadwatul `Ulama in Lucknow, India. He also has a B.A. degree from Kanpur University and a postgraduate diploma in journalism from the City University in London.