Arafat A. Razzaque
Assistant Professor, Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
Arafat A. Razzaque is an assistant professor in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. He received his PhD in history and middle eastern studies from Harvard University. Prior to arriving in Toronto, Razzaque served as a research associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.
Razzaque is a historian of the medieval Near East, focusing on the early centuries of Islam. His research interests are religion, society and culture in the Abbasid empire, including medieval scholarly etiquettes and the social history of intellectual life.
Razzaque’s current project is a study of ideas about sinful gossip and the ethics of speech in early Islamic thought, in which he examines the legacy of a movement of influential ascetics in 8th-century Iraq and their engagement with wider traditions of wisdom rooted in late antique Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian sources.
Additional research and teaching interests include gender and Islamic family law, the history of sexuality, and the lives of non-Muslims in Islamic history. He has also previously studied and published on the early modern European reception of the Thousand and One Nights tales, commonly known in English as the Arabian Nights.