Research
The AbuSulayman Center’s research projects reflect its role as a leading hub for multidisciplinary inquiry into the Muslim world and its global connections. Supported by major private and public foundations, these initiatives bring together scholars from across disciplines to explore the rich and varied intersections of religion, politics, culture, and society. With a strong emphasis on cross-regional and cross-cultural perspectives, the Center’s projects illuminate both historical and contemporary dynamics that shape Muslim communities around the world. Collectively, this body of work highlights the Center’s commitment to advancing scholarship that is rigorous, collaborative, and globally engaged. Explore our current and past initiatives below to learn more about the Center’s wide-ranging research portfolio.
As the Center's principal online publication platform, the Maydan has established itself as the premier academic venue for digital scholarship of global Islam and its history. In addition to its increasing delivery of original scholarly works to the broader academic audience and informed public, the Maydan expanded and developed a diversified portfolio of academic content to facilitate research. The website now features the most comprehensive compilations of language programs, grant opportunities for faculty and graduate students, and graduate programs across the world. Quarterly journal and monthly book roundups have expanded significantly which turned Maydan into a one-stop website to follow the largest number of scholarly articles and books published. The Maydan is also growing in the area of audiovisual content, delivering significant scholarly lectures, panels, and symposia to a general audience. The Maydan also started to produce podcasts featuring scholarly views on major contemporary issues.
Black American Muslim Internationalism
The Black Muslim Internationalism (BAMI) project grew out of the After Malcolm Digital archives project (also sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation and based at the Center for Global Islamic Studies). The BAMI project is led by its principal investigator, Dr. Aminah (McCloud) Al-Deen, one of the foremost experts globally on African- American Islam. The project works in collaboration with leading university-based scholars, a network of community-based historians, imams, community members, artists of all kinds in three cities (the Washington DC area DMV, Philadelphia, and Atlanta) to develop a multi-tiered research and programming initiative that can influence academic and public narratives around religion, race, and identity while also filling current gaps in the scholarly record.
Islamic Moral Theology and the Future
The Islamic Moral Theology and the Future project (IMTF) brings together Muslim scholars and thinkers from around the world to explore the relevance of Islamic moral and ethical thinking to some of the global ethical challenges in the 21st century. Project scholars will explore how Muslim conceptions of morality and the cultivation of virtue at both the individual and communal level can contribute to a cross-cultural conversation about how we address contemporary issues, from income inequality and unsustainable consumerism; to social media platforms that enhance, but sometimes also distort, our human connections; to the need to create physical spaces that reflect the value of local community and foster a greater sense of responsibility to our neighbors.
View the IMTF Website
Find all IMTF contributions on the Maydan here.
After Malcolm Digital Archive
In Spring 2019, the Center imported and re-launched the After Malcolm Project, initially developed at Georgia Tech University. The project is a digital database of publications and private archives of African-American Muslim communities, open to the public and researchers. Setting up a digital humanities and oral history project that will document the breadth and diversity of American Muslim communities with a particular focus on the mid-Atlantic region and southern United States. Whereas much of the current discussion of Muslims in the US focuses on refugees and recent immigrants, the purpose of this project will be to document and showcase the American Muslim experience across several centuries and to explain how major periods and events throughout American history were experience by and shaped Muslim communities of diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds.
View After Malcolm Digital Archive
Past Projects
At the heart of the center's work are a wide range of research projects that reflect our faculty's diverse interests and innovative scholarship. In its first few years, the center was awarded several large grants to support research by its distinguished faculty members. The center has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carnegie Corporation of New York, El-Hibri Charitable Foundation, and British Council and Social Science Research Council.
In the spirit of Islam's rich intellectual and scholarly traditions, these projects represent multiple disciplines and explore a wide range of topics, both historical and contemporary, relating to Islam and Muslim societies around the world. Resources developed from these grant projects include academic books and journal articles, curriculum and teaching resources for schoolteachers, and online materials intended for the broader public.
The Study Qur'an
The El-Hibri Charitable Foundation of Washington, D.C., awarded the Ali Vural Ak Center a grant to support the Study Qur'an project, a collective editorial effort to provide a new translation of the Qur'an accessible to the English-speaking public. This English translation aimed to take the best from previous English translations of the Qur'an (Arberry, Pickthall, and Asad) and include commentaries (tafsir), known only in Arabic and Persian until now, from both Sunni and Shi'ite sources. Tafsir runs alongside the Qur'anic text and provides readers a key for studying the Qur'an in the same vein as study Bibles have assisted readers in the Protestant and Catholic traditions. Legal, philological, philosophical, and mystical commentaries are included from both Sunni and Shi'ite sources and is a first in providing readers a more inclusive vision of the Qur'an.
The El-Hibri grant, administered by the Ali Vural Ak Center and George Mason University, supported course release and summer funding for three editorial researchers and a team of research assistants who worked on this project. Editorial leadership worked under the direction of University Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University.
Harper & Row of San Francisco, California published this eagerly awaited translation of the Qur'an, The Study Qur'an, in the fall of 2015.
Related Conferences
"New Approaches to Qur'an and Exegesis" October 2010
"Contemplating the Qur'an" March 2013
"The Qur'an and the Reading of History" April 2015
The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies and Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media have collaborated on the website content and design for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Bridging Cultures Bookshelf/Muslim Journeys project.
The Bridging Cultures Bookshelf/Muslim Journeys is a set of over 25 books and documentaries, as well as other resources including access to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, that have been selected for distribution to up to 1,000 competing public libraries, academic libraries, and state humanities councils in an effort to familiarize the public with the diverse people, places, history, faith and cultures of Muslims in America and around the globe. The project’s website acts as a comprehensive guide to the Bookshelf, including thematic grouping of the books, profiles of the books and authors, additional primary sources related to the texts, and bibliographies for further reading on its diverse subject matter.
In addition to developing the website’s content, the Ali Vural Ak Center has also been involved in other aspects of the project. Dr. Peter Mandaville, Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center, is the project’s Principal Investigator, and Susan Douglass, the Center’s Senior Research Associate, served as a consultant to the national group of scholars, humanities educators, librarians, and program experts who were tasked with selecting the titles to be included in the Bookshelf.
The American Library Association partnered with NEH to conduct the online application process for public libraries, among other institutions, to compete for the Bookshelf and its accompanying resources, as well as to provide support for the libraries’ public programs. The Bookshelf project was formally announced along with the final selections at ALA’s annual conference in Anaheim, California on June 15, 2012. To date, the Bookshelf has been sent to over 950 libraries nationwide.
Arab Scholars Project
With generous support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ali Vural Ak Center is partnering with the Arab Studies Institute to undertake a broad range of activities designed to enhance the profile and public role of scholars int he Middle East in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. Achieving an enhanced relationship between social science scholarship. legal scholarship, transparency, and citizen empowerment in the Arab world, the Arab Scholars Project will reduce the barriers that perviously separated knowledge producers from citizenry and the broader public sphere.
As the political and civic landscape of the Arab world is reconfigured, this project aims to ensure that social scientists in the region are visible, valued, and well-positioned to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity to have a positive impact on the future of their societies by providing ideas, knowledge, and critiques that inform decision-making, policy, and public debate at various levels of society. There are three main thematic strands to the project's work: legal scholarship and civil society; exploring and transcending religion and secularity in public life; and the political economy of development and inclusion in the new Middle East.
Beyond Golden Age and Decline
The Ali Vural Ak Center was awarded a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in a national competition of more than 100 applicants from institutions around the country. The center, along with seven other institutions, was chosen to host public forums designed to share the best of recent humanities research with the general public on the topic of the NEH Bridging Cultures initiative, designed to foster civil discourse among varied citizenries in the United States.
Partnering with the Viginia Foundation for the Humanities, the center convened a Scholars Forum titled "Beyond Golden Age and Decline: The Legacies of Muslim Societies in Global Modernity, 1300-1900" at Mason in March 2011. The forum hosted more than 30 national and international scholars of Islamic history and world history, inlcuding faculty and researchers from the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard University, Brown University, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, the Univeristy of Edinburgh, and the American University in Cairo. They shared recent work and interdisciplinary ideas in the fields of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal studies and world history.
Watch videos from the "Beyond Golden Age and Decline" Forum here
The scholars confronted commonly accepted readings of Islamic history between the 14th and 20th centuries, an era described as one of general decline for Muslim societies in contrast to the preceding Islamic Golden Age. Focusing on the history of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, speakers brought to light recent scholarship on this misunderstood era in Muslim history and debunked widely perpetuated myths within academia and among the public. A public web page, http://www.muslimmodernities.org/, was designed specially for this conference, where detailed information about participating scholars and paper presentations are available.
Following the forum, a two-day Program Development Workshop was held in Charlottesville, Virginia, hosting educators from state and regional public schools, museum professionals from the Newseum and Virginia Association of Museums, filmmakers, and other practitioners. The group developed strategies for disseminating knowledge from the forum through public programs. The workshop was held in parallel with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Festival of the Book, the largest event of its kind in the mid-Atlantic region, and featured panels by forum participants with recent books on contemporary Muslim issues.
Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean
The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies, with a grant from the British Council’s and Social Science Research Council’s “Our Shared Past” initiative, has developed a set of six teaching modules entitled "Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean: A World History Curriculum Project for Educators".
The project was led by Dr. Peter Mandaville, Co-Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center, with a team of distinguished Mediterranean historians and scholars of pedagogy from the U.S., Europe, Turkey, and North Africa, and was written by experienced world history curriculum developers. The set of six interdisciplinary teaching modules spans the geography and history of the Mediterranean in the context of world history from ancient times to the present. The Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean curriculum is free under Creative Commons License and available online at http://mediterraneansharedpast.org.
Muslim Atlantic
The Muslim Atlantic project is a project which focuses on 'contextualizing Islam in Europe and North America'. The project explores and engages efforts made by Muslim intellectuals, scholars, and thinkers working on approaches to the interpretations of Islam, that grow out of lived experiences of Muslims in the West.
View Muslim Atlantic Project
Teaching Connected Histories of the Mediterranean
"Teaching Connected Histories of the Mediterranean" was a Summer Institute for Teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It represented a partnership between George Mason University and the University of Denver, and took place in Denver, Colorado from July 6-24, 2015.
This program offered secondary school teachers of courses such as world history, world geography, world religions, and global studies the opportunity to focus on the Mediterranean region from a world historical perspective.
Under the guidance of leading scholars currently active in this field, participants explored ways to incorporate this dynamic region into their existing courses.
Building on the strengths of two leading universities in Middle East and Islamic Studies, George Mason University and the University of Denver, this three-week summer program connected teachers with the recent scholarship on this region and allowed them to access new curriculum materials developed under the direction of several prominent scholars, including some of the institute's faculty, for the K-12 classroom.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities