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:
Sufism and other renunciant movements before the Junaydi synthesis; the life and works of Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
Courses Taught:
'Hadith, Islamic law, and early Sufism'
Recent Publications:
‘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.
Ḥadith, Piety and Law: Selected Studies. Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies 3. Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2015.
‘Māwardī’s Legal Thinking’, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 68-86, at http://islamichistorycommons.org/mem/al-usur-al-wusta (accessed 21 November 2015).
‘The Early Controversy Over Whether the Prophet Saw God’, Arabica 62 (2015): 459-76.
‘Muḥammad Nāṣir al‑Dīn al‑Albānī and Traditional Hadith Criticism’. Pages 33-51 in Reclaiming Islamic Tradition: Modern Interpretations of the Classical Heritage. Edited by Elisabeth Kendall and Ahmad Khan. Edinburgh: University Press, 2016.
‘The Spread of Ḥanafism to Khurasan and Transoxania’. Pages 13-30 in Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World. Edited by A. C. S. Peacock & D. G. Tor. I. B. Tauris & BIPS Persian Studies Series 7. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015.
