Faisal Devji

Faisal Devji completed his Ph.D. in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. He was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he ran the graduate program at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, which included schools in Tajikistan and Iran. Returning to regular academic life in 2003, he taught for two years at Yale University as a visiting lecturer and another four at The New School for Social Research in New York as Associate Professor, arriving at the University of Oxford as Reader in Modern South Asian History in 2009.

Faisal is interested in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. In his research, he has focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project. He is also very interested in the different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political reality, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation. His recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world.

Faisal Devji is the author of four books:

• Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013)

• The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (2012)

• The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (2009)

• Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005)

More at https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-faisal-devji