The second round of the AMI Doctoral Scholarship has been awarded to two young scholars of Imāmī Shīʿism whose research sheds new light on the tradition from a variety of perspectives. The scholarship was set up to promote and encourage the study of Imāmī Shīʿism in academia.
Sarah Aziz
Sarah Aziz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She earned her MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and her BA with honors in Religious Studies from Davidson College. Her fields of interest include Classical Arabic literature, Islamic intellectual history, Shiism, and Sufism. Her research examines the historical, literary, and intellectual dimensions of early Islamic prayer literature and its commentarial traditions. Within the prayer genre, she is especially interested in the development, literary character, and reception of the corpus of prayers and supplications attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and his Household (Ahl al-Bayt). For her dissertation, Sarah focuses on al-Ṣaḥīfa al-Sajjādiyya (The Scroll of al-Sajjād), the prayer manual attributed to ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 712), which is arguably the earliest prayer manual in Islamic sources and one of the earliest examples of the Arabic-Islamic genre of prayer composed in ornate rhymed prose. Investigating the Ṣaḥīfa’s textual tradition, content, literary features, and reception, Sarah’s study breaks new ground in our understanding of the text’s literary and intellectual significance and overall function.
Amir Mohammad Emami
Amir Mohammad Emami is a PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He holds a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Tehran. His research interests include the intellectual history of the Islamic world, particularly within the landscapes of Iran since the 17th century, and the intersections of Islamic scholarly disciplines of falsafa, kalām, and uṣūl al-fiqh with contemporary philosophy. His first publication in the field is “Tajarrī as Religious Luck,” published in Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World (ed. Peter Adamson, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). He is genuinely interested in the possible contribution of Islamic intellectual traditions to the global philosophy of religion and the methodological concerns regarding the relation of intellectual history to philosophy. He is currently working on a PhD thesis on the philosophical ideas of Mīrzā Mahdī Iṣfahānī (d. 1365/1946), the founder of the theological school of Maktab-i Maʿārif, also known as the Maktab-i Tafkīk (the School of Separation).
