FACULTY
Faculty Team
Hatim Bazian
Dr. Hatem Bazian is a Decolonial scholar who centers Islam’s epistemology in all his work and examines the contemporary world through a global south lens. Dr. Bazian is the leading scholar in the Islamophobia Studies field, having founded the Islamophobia Studies Center, Editor-in-Chief of the Islamophobia Studies Journal, co-founder and current President of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association (IISRA); advised on the 2021, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief report on Countering Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Hatred to Eliminate Discrimination and Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief, and contributed to the Carter Center 2018 report, Countering the Islamophobia Industry Toward More Effective Strategies
Dr. Bazian authored five books, the latest being Erasing the Human: Collapse of the Postcolonial World and the Refugee-Immigration Crisis, edited 8 volumes of the Islamophobia Studies Journal and hundreds of published articles.
Dr. Bazian is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Bazian is co-founder and former Professor at Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal Arts College in the United States and a senior lecturer in the Departments of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Bazian between 2002-2007, also served as an adjunct professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to Berkeley, Prof. Bazian served as a visiting Professor in Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California 2001-2007 and adviser to the Religion, Politics and Globalization Center at UC Berkeley.
At the community level, Dr. Bazian is the President of the Northern California Islamic Council, co-founder, and National Chair of American Muslims for Palestine, Chairman of the Board of Muslim Legal Fund for America, and founder and President of Palestine Center for Public Policy.
Dr Barnor Hesse
Dr Barnor Hesse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. He teaches and researches in the areas of Black Political Thought, Decolonial Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Race Studies. His most recent publications are ‘Derrida’s Black Accent: Decolonial Deconstruction’ in ReOrient, 2023, Vol. 8, No.1. He is also author of the forthcoming, ‘Citations of Black Political Thought: The Black Constitutive Outside’ (forthcoming, 2025, Duke University Press).
Anne Norton
Anne Norton is the author of Wild Democracy: Anarchy Courage and Ruling the Law; On the Muslim Question; 95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method; Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire; Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists; and other works on empire and resistance. She is Stacey and Henry Jackson President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She was educated at the University of Chicago where she studied with Fazlur Rahman She is on the board of Re-Orient and the Academic Council of the al Waleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.
Salman Sayyid
S. Sayyid is based at the University of Leeds and holds a Chair in Decolonial Thought and Social Theory. Sayyid has held academic positions in London, Manchester, and Adelaide. His research and publications focus on rhetoric, Islamophobia and Critical Muslim Studies. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. Some of his major publications include A Fundamental Fear (a book that, despite being banned by the Malaysian government, is now in its third edition), Thinking Through Islamophobia (co-edited with Abdoolkarim Vakil), and Recalling The Caliphate. He is the founding editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal: ReOrient.
Sa’diyya Shaikh
Sa’diyya Shaikh is Professor in the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town, and director of the research unit, Centre for Contemporary Islam. She specialises in the study of Islam, gender ethics, and feminist theory, with a special interest in Sufism. Her study of Islam began with an abiding interest in existential questions as well as a commitment to social justice – much of her work is animated by an interest and curiosity about the relationship between the realms of spiritual and the political.
She has published on interpretations of the Qur’an, hadith and Sufi texts; Islamic feminism; gender-based violence; Sufism and Islamic Law; contemporary Muslim women’s embodied ethics; and marriage, sexuality and reproductive choices amongst South African Muslim women. She is author of Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ʿArabī, Gender, and Sexuality (2012) and co-author and editor of The Women’s Khutbah Book: Contemporary Sermons on Spirituality and Justice from around the World (2022) and Violence Against Women in Contemporary World Religions: Roots and Cures (co-edited with Daniel Maguire, 2007). She is involved in a number of socially engaged networks as a scholar-activist invested in ways to promote gender and social justice. In her ongoing work on ethics and Sufism, as well as in her own spiritual life, Sa’diyya draws on the inspiration, transmission and teachings of a number of contemporary Sufi teachers including Shaykh Muhammad Rahim Bawa Muhiyadin (rahmatullah alayhi), Shaykha Fawzia Al-Rawi, Shaykha Cemal Nur Sargut, and Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri.
Santiago Slabodsky
Santiago Slabodsky is an Argentinean sociologist of knowledge who currently holds the Kaufman Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies and served as the inaugural associate director of the Center for the Study of Race, Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University in New York. He studies transnational conversations between Jewish and Global South social theories and political movements with special attention to historical and conceptual Jewish-Muslim-Liberationist dialogues.
Among his publications, his book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking, was awarded the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He has served as concurrent visiting professor at institutions in Spain, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, North Macedonia, Argentina and South Africa, as co-chair of the Liberation Theologies and Religions, Social Conflict and Peace units at the American Academy of Religion and as co-leader of the Interreligiosities, Racisms and Anti-Imperialisms track at the DARE-CWM project in the 2024 and 2025 international meetings in Thailand and Zimbabwe. He is currently co-director and associate editor of the journals Decolonial Horizons, based in Chile, and ReOrient: Critical Muslim Studies in the UK.
AbdoolKarim Vakil
AbdoolKarim Vakil is lecturer in History and Portuguese studies in the departments of History and of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London. He is a past chair of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Research and Documentation Committee, and former academic advisor to the Muslim Community of Lisbon, Portugal. AbdoolKarim’s publications include the co-edited and co-authored volumes Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (2010), Moçambique: Memória Falada do Islão e da Guerra (2011), and Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts (2021).
With S. Sayyid he has published , ‘Reports of Islamophobia: 1997 and 2017’, ReOrient CMS Blogs (Nov. 2017); ‘In Conversation: Thinking Through Islamophobia’, Network ReOrient Critical Muslim Studies Podcasts (Dec. 2020); ‘Foreword’ to Defining Islamophobia: A Contemporary Understanding of How Expressions of Muslimness are Targeted, Muslim Council of Britain (2021), and most recently, the chapters ‘The Grammar of Islamophobia’ in Salman al-Azami ed., Media Language on Islam and Muslims: Terminology and Effects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); ‘Critical Muslim Studies and the Remaking of the (Ancient) World’, in Mathura Umachandran and Chella Ward eds., Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics (2024), and ‘Is This The Age of Islamophobia?’ (in press).
Jasmin Zine
Jasmin Zine is a Professor of Sociology and Religion & Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada. Her recent book, Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation (2022, McGill -Queens University Press) explores the experiences of the millennial generation of Canadian Muslim youth who came of age during the global war on terror and times of heightened anti-Muslim racism. Under Siege was named on the Hill Times list of Best 100 Books of 2022. She is author of a major report on the Canadian Islamophobia industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Eco-System in the Great White North (2022) in partnership with the Islamophobia Studies Center and the Islamophobia Research and Development Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The report documents the networks of hate and bigotry that orchestrate, organize, purvey, and monetize Islamophobia in Canada.
Her edited books include Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada (University of British Columbia, 2012) and Muslim Women Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in Post 9/11 Cultural Practice (Routledge, 2014, with L. K Taylor).
Dr. Zine has served as a consultant on combating Islamophobia for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Council of Europe (COE), and the Office for the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (ODHIR/OSCE). She is a sought-after media commentator and has given numerous invited talks and keynotes in dozens of countries internationally. Dr. Zine is co-founder and Vice President of the International Islamophobia Studies Research Association (IISRA).
