Sami Al Daghistani

Sami is Associate Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Lund University, an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) in New York City, and a Research Scholar at the Middle East Institute (MEI) at Columbia University in New York (both since 2019). His research is situated at the intersection of Islamic economics, environment, ethics, and law in Islamic intellectual history and in the contemporary period. His teaching and research are informed by an interdisciplinary approach and cross-cultural perspectives, whereby he uses historical and historiographical methods, as well as textual analysis in order to address relevant societal questions across the Muslim world.

Prior to coming to Lund University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo (2020-2024), a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (2017-2018), and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University (2017-2018). He obtained his PhD in 2017 in Islamic Studies at Leiden University with a co-supervision at Columbia University under the mentorship of Wael B. Hallaq. During his PhD studies, he was a Visiting Scholar at MESAAS and IRCPL at Columbia University (2015-2017). Previously, he studied Arabic and Islamic Studies in Sarajevo (2010), Cairo (2011), Rabat (2013), Leiden (2011-2013), and at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University (2014). 

He is the author of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s Ethical Teachings: Economics of Happiness (Anthem Press, 2021), the award-wining The Making of Islamic Economic Thought: Islamization, Law, and Moral Discourses (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Islam in ljubezen (Beletrina: Ljubljana, 2023), as well as a co-editor of Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa (Review of Middle East Studies, 2021), and the editor of Recovering Environmental and Economic Traditions in the Islamic World (Brill, forthcoming 2024). He also translated Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla (2017) and Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (2016) to Slovenian. In 2021, he launched an interdisciplinary research group and consortium Critical Islamic Studies, whose aims are to engage with both historical and modern analysis of and research in the field of Islamic Studies, and to seek external funding opportunities and collaboration.