Position:
Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies
Faculty / College Address:
Oriental Institute / Pembroke College
Email:
christopher.melchert@pmb.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
Islamic Movements and Institutions, Ninth-Tenth Centuries C.E.
Current Projects:
The Mukhtaṣars of al-Buwayṭī (Shāfiʿi), al-Muzanī (Shāfiʿi), and al-Khiraqī (Ḥanbali).
Courses Taught:
Hadith, Islamic law, and early Sufism
Recent Publications:
‘Kitāb al-Ḥujjah ʿalá ahl al-Madīnah and the transition from regional schools to personal’, Studia Islamica, no 117 (2022), 64-87.
‘Al-Shāfiʿī against the Kufan school’, Islamic law and society 29 (2022): 34-57.
‘The Inquisition outside Baghdad’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 141 (2021): 201-10.
Before Sufism: early Islamic renunciant piety. Islam - thought, culture, and society 4. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2020.
‘The theory and practice of hadith criticism in the mid-ninth century’. Pages 74-102 in Islam at 250: studies in memory of G.H.A. Juynboll. Edited by Petra M. Sijpesteijn and Camilla Adang. Leiden studies in Islam and society 10. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
‘Ibn al-Mubārak, traditionist’. Pages 49-69 in Modern hadith studies. Edited by Belal Alabbas, Michael Dann, and Christopher Melchert. Edinburgh: University Press, 2020.
‘The rightly-guided caliphs: the range of views preserved in ḥadīth’. Pages 63-79 in Political quietism in Islam: Sunni and Shi‘i practice and thought. Edited by Saud Al-Sarhan. London: I. B. Tauris, 2020.
‘Ibrāhīm al-Naḫa‛ī (Kufan, d. 96/714)’, Arabica 67 (2020): 60-81.
‘The Musnad of al-Shāfi‛ī’, Studia Islamica, no 114 (2019), 249-64.
‘The controversy over reciting the Qurʾān with tones (al‑qirāʾah bi’l‑alḥān)’, Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association 4 (2019): 85-109.
‘Al-Shaybānī and contemporary renunciant piety’, Journal of Abbasid studies 6 (2019): 52-85.
‘Why non-Muslim subjects are to pay the jizya’. Pages 347-56 in Contacts and interaction. Proceedings of the 27th congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants Helsinki 2014. Edited by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Petteri Koskikallio, and Ilkka Lindstedt. Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta 254. Leuven: Peeters, 2017.
‘Apocalypticism in Sunni hadith’. Pages 267-89 in Apocalypticism and eschatology in Late Antiquity: encounters in the Abrahamic religions, 6th-8th centuries. Edited by Hagit Amirav, Emmanouela Grypeou, and Guy Stroumsa. Late antique history and religion 17. Leuven: Peeters, 2017.
‘Bukhārī’s kitāb tafsīr al‑Qur’ān’, Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association 1 (2016): 149-72.
‘The transmission of hadith: changes in the ninth and tenth centuries c.e.’ Pages 229-46 in Arabic and Islamic studies in Europe and beyond. Proceedings of the 26th congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Basel 2012. Edited by Maurus Reinkowski and Monika Winet with Sevinç Yasar Gil. Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta 248. Leuven: Peeters, 2016.
‘Basra and Kufa as the earliest centers of Islamic legal controversy’. Pages 173-94 in Islamic cultures, Islamic contexts: essays in honor of Professor Patricia Crone. Edited by Behnam Sadeghi, Asad Q. Ahmed, Adam Silverstein, and Robert G. Hoyland. Islamic history and civilization, studies and texts, 114. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
‘Ibn al‑Mubārak’s Kitāb al‑Jihād and early renunciant literature’. Pages 49-69 in Violence in Islamic thought from the Qur’ān to the Mongols. Edited by Robert Gleave and István Kristó-Nagy. Legitimate and illegitimate violence in Islamic thought 1. Edinburgh: University Press, 2015.
‘Three qur’anic terms (siyāḥa, ḥikma and ṣiddīq) of special interest to the early renunciants’. Pages 89-116 in The meaning of the word: lexicography and qur’anic exegesis. Edited by S. R. Burge. London: Oxford University Press, 2015.
‘Before ṣūfiyyāt: Female Muslim Renunciants in the 8th and 9th Centuries CE’, Journal of Sufi Studies 5 (2015): 115-39.
