“Repairing Modernity: Traditionalist ʿUlamāʾ Responses to Modern Muslim Reform Movements”
ACOR-CAORC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021–2022
Islamic Studies / Intellectual History of the Middle East, Karl Eberhard Tübingen University, Germany
Besnik Sinani is a Research Fellow at the Chair for Hadith Studies and Prophetic Traditions at the Center for Muslim Theology at Karl Eberhard Tübingen University in Germany. His research focuses on modern transformations of Muslim conceptions of prophecy and the normative practices of veneration of the Prophet Muhammad (taʿzim). Prior to his current position, Besnik was a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, where he worked on post-Salafism and religious revisionism in contemporary Saudi Arabia. He holds a Ph.D. from Free University of Berlin and his dissertation on Sufism in Saudi Arabia received the DAVO (German Congress of Middle Eastern Studies) 2021 Dissertation Award. Besnik is currently working on an article that explores the responses of traditionalist Muslim Scholars to Islamic modernism and Salafism, in defense of the Sunni canonical schools of law (madhhabs), pre-modern schools of theology (Ashʿarism and Maturidism), Sufism, and political theology.
