United States · Historian of Islamic thought; Imam Khattab Chair of Islamic Studies, University of Toledo; founder of the Ummatics Institute; editor at Yaqeen Institute
Ovamir Anjum is a historian of Islamic thought who works on how theology, ethics, law and politics fit together in classical and medieval Islam, and on what that tradition offers Muslims today. He was born in Karachi and grew up in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States. His first religious teaching came at home, including from his grandmother. He later studied fiqh with Hanafi and Ahl-e-Hadith scholars in South Asia, and legal theory and Qur’anic recitation with teachers trained at al-Azhar and in Syria.
He began in the sciences, with a bachelor’s in nuclear engineering and physics and a master’s in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He then took a master’s in the social sciences at the University of Chicago and returned to Wisconsin–Madison for a PhD in history. His dissertation on reason and politics in medieval Islamic thought became his first book. From 2007 to 2009 he was a senior fellow of Wisconsin’s Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions. He then moved to the University of Toledo, where he holds the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies in Philosophy and Religious Studies.
Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge University Press, 2012) rereads the history of Islamic political thought around Ibn Taymiyya. His translation of Ibn al-Qayyim’s Madārij al-sālikīn, published by Brill as Ranks of the Divine Seekers (two volumes, 2020), is part of a planned four-volume edition with the Arabic text alongside. He has also written journal articles on al-Ghazālī, Ibn Qayyim, Salafism, citizenship and the “Constitution” of Medina, and chapters on governance and Islamic political theology.
From 2017 he edited the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, renamed the American Journal of Islam and Society under his editorship in 2020, and he later became its co-editor. At Yaqeen Institute he became editor-in-chief of its new editorial review board in November 2020, and has since also served as director of research. Around 2021–22 he founded the Ummatics Institute, which grew out of his 2019 essay “Who Wants the Caliphate?” and studies how the global Muslim community might cooperate and govern itself today. He writes regularly for AlJumuah magazine, has taught at AlMaghrib Institute and ALIM, and gives public lectures and Ramadan series.