Professor Christopher Shackle

Religions; literature; language

Christopher Shackle studied Persian and Turkish at Oxford, following his BA with a Diploma and BLitt in Social Anthropology. He first came to the Department in 1966, and was appointed Professor in 1985. He served as Head of Department from 1983 to 1987 and as Pro-Director of SOAS from 1997 until 2003. He is a joint member of the Department of South Asia and the Department of the Study of Religions. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990, he received the 2004 Award of the Royal Asiatic Society and was given Pakistan's highest award for the arts, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, in 2005. His publications include The Siraiki language of central Pakistan (1976), A Guru Nanak glossary (1981, 2nd ed 1995), An introduction to the sacred language of the Sikhs (1983, 2nd ed 1985), The Sikhs (1984, a report for the Minority Rights Group), Ismaili hymns from South Asia: an introduction to the Ginans (1992, 2nd ed 2000, with Zawahir Moir), Qasida poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (1996, with Stefan Sperl), Hali's Musaddas (1997, with Javed Majeed), A treasury of Indian love poems (1999, with Nicholas Awde), Sikh religion culture and ethnicity (2000, with Gurharpal Singh and Arvind Mandair), SOAS since the sixties (2003, with David Arnold), Teachings of the Sikh Gurus (2005, with Arvind Mandair), and Farid al-Din Attar and the Persian Sufi tradition (forthcoming 2006, with Leonard Lewisohn), as well as jointly-authored titles cited under R.Snell below. His current writing projects include a history of Punjabi literature and a monograph on Punjabi Sufi poetry.