Near and Middle East Section

Dr Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour

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Key information

Roles: Postdoctoral Researcher in Islamic Studies
Department: Near and Middle East Section
Qualifications: BA (Al-Azhar University), MA (Durham)
Office: 460
Email address: mm161@soas.ac.uk
Telephone number: (020 7898) 4297
Internal Supervisors: Dr Mustafa Shah & Professor Muhammad A S Abdel Haleem, OBE

Biography

Gamal received his primary, secondary, and undergraduate studies at Al-Azhar in Egypt, graduating as valedictorian of his class with a bachelor’s in Islamic Studies in 2011. He then completed his MA in Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, U.K, funded by the British Chevening Scholarship. He did his PhD at SOAS in Comparative Theology, supervised by Prof. Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Dr. Erica Hunter, and Dr. Mustafa Shah. His thesis was examined at Cambridge University by Prof. Rowan Williams and Prof. Ian Netton. The thesis was then published as a monograph with BRILL publishers in April 2021. In 2019, Gamal was offered a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship from the Centre of Islamic Studies at SOAS, dealing with how the Quran uses the term kufr (disbelief) and how this impacts the Islamic theology of interfaith marriages. His forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, which carries the title of From The Higher Objectives of Islamic Law to the Higher Objectives of Islamic Theology: Towards a Theory of Maqāṣid al-‘Aqīdah, opens the doors to a new field of study in Islamic theology.

A. English publications in circulation:

A Comparative History of Catholic and Ash‘arī Theologies of Truth and Salvation: Inclusive Minorities, Exclusive Majorities (Leiden: BRILL, 2021).
Hagia Sophia: The Meaning of Ottoman Symbolism, commentary co-authored with Paul Hedges (NTU: RSIS Commentaries, August 2020).
The Islamic Theology of Interfaith Marriages between Theology, Law and Individual Ijtihad, Iss. 17, ed. Abdullah Saeed and Paul Hedges (Nanyang Technological University: RSIS, June 2020).
Review of: Wael B. Hallaq, “Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Abdurrahman Taha,” in Journal of Islamic Ethics, Vol. 3. Iss. 1-2 (Leiden: BRILL, 2019), pp. 238-243.
“Muhammad abu Zahra's Muslim Theology of Religions,” in Religious Imaginations: How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today's World, ed. James Walters (London: Gingko Library, Dec. 2018).
“If one faith is true, does this mean all others are false?,” in Inter-religious Insights, ed. Alan Race (London: World Congress of Faith, Dec. 2017); winning script in the 2017 annual essay competition.

B. Forthcoming publications

From The Higher Objectives of Islamic Law to the Higher Objectives of Islamic Theology: Towards a Theory of Maqāṣid al-‘Aqīdah (Monograph with Oxford University Press, 2022).
“Muḥammad ‘Abduh and the False Divorce between Tradition and Modernity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Reform, ed. Emad Hamdeh and Natana Delong-Bas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
'Islam and the Ethics of Interfaith Dialogue,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Ethics, ed. Mustafa Shah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)