Ahmed Ezzat

PhD candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Ahmed is studying the ‘History and culture of lawfare in Egypt – The Case of Institutionalising the Prerogative State within Egypt’s Normal juridical Order.

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Amina Shareef

PhD candidate at the Faculty of Education

Amina’s study investigates the impact of the discourses of community cohesion and counter-terrorism on young British Muslim sense of self and belonging. The key areas of interest are identity and citizenship-making in a global age within the boundaries of nation.

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Samir Saad

PhD candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Samir is researching the political history of law-making in the late Ottoman Empire, Syria and Jordan between about 1860 and 1978. He is surveying the attitudes of political agents toward reform legislation, and the ways in which politics influenced the preparation and adoption of such legislation in the face of crisis and change.

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Luke Wilkinson

MPhil candidate at the Faculty of History

Having studied History at Cambridge, Luke is continuing his studies here with an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History. Luke is currently researching a thesis on the reconstruction of Islam in Muhammad Iqbal and Khomeini. His focus is on how these two towering magi of Islam developed Islamic ideas of temporality, freedom, and revolution in conversation with European philosophers like Bergson and Heidegger. In so doing, Luke hopes to navigate the range of influence of Iqbal in Iran while rebuilding Khomeini “the Ayatollah” as a complex philosopher (he has long been reduced to a mere political tactician).

Luke is also currently writing a piece on temporality and history in the thought of Iqbal, with a focus on the thinker’s educational context at Cambridge between 1905 and 1907. This context has been under-appreciated in Iqbal’s later thought even though the convergence of theories of relativity in physics and British idealism – the crackling debate at Cambridge during the turn of the twentieth century – appears throughout Iqbal’s discussion of temporality and philosophical history in his magnum opus, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.

In the past, Luke has written – academically and for wider circulation – on the concept of revolution in the thought of Ruhollah Khomeini, Maltese postcolonial thought, and temporality in the Mediterranean.

Ms Rubby Haji Naif

MPhil candidate at the Faculty of Divinity,

Ruby’s research focus on the feminist agenda that women organizations which work on Muslim-Jewish partnership articulate in their services and advocacy efforts.  Her research will combine in-depth interviews and participants observation with a feminist organization that works on Israeli-Palestinian Partnership. The research aims to explore how this feminist agenda address inequality while promoting solidarity. The research will explore their feminist agenda based on the intersection of religion, nationality, and gender.