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Irfan Ahmad

Irfan Ahmad

Irfan Ahmad is an anthropologist and lecturer at Monash University, where he also helps lead The Centre for Islam and the Modern World. Before joining Monash (in 2009), Irfan taught at Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam from where he earned his Doctorate.  He won the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research’s (NWO) prestigious Rubicon fellowship to complete his post-doctorate at Leiden University. He is the author of Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of the Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press) which was short-listed for the ICAS (International Convention of Asian Scholars) Book Prize, 2011, and was published to wide acclaim in 2009. Irfan is on the Editorial Board of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and is Associate Editor of the journal Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations. He has held visiting fellowship at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany. Irfan also contributes to debates in media – print and visual. Along with English, his interviews have appeared in Dutch, Hindi, Turkish, and Urdu (BBC) media.

 

Irfan Ahmad reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad' edited by Jonathan E. Brockopp

March 2011, no. 329 • 01 March 2011
In A Fundamental Fear (1997), Bobby Sayyid wrote about the spectre of Islam haunting the West. Important to this ‘hauntology’ is Muhammad: the last prophet of Islam. From the English chronicler Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther to the Pentagon’s defence intelligence secretary, William Boykin, many have depicted Muhammad as the obverse of everything the West and Christianity r ... (read more)