SRI is pleased to announce that Dr. Tahera Qutbuddin has joined our Academic Advisory board.
The Academic Advisory Board plays a pivotal role in providing their expert counsel as it pertains to the academic goals of the Shi’a Research Institute. This involves advising SRI on academic projects and facilitating their successful implementations.
We look forward to working with her on the future of SRI!
About Dr. Qutbuddin:
Tahera Qutbuddin is Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. She taught previously for twenty years at the University of Chicago, where she is now Professor Emerita of Arabic literature.
Her scholarship focuses on intersections of the literary, the religious, and the political in classical Arabic poetry and prose. Her publications include books and articles on a wide range of topics in classical Arabic literature and Islamic studies—such as poetry, orations, epistles, aphorisms, narrative, poetics, and philology—as well as the orations and sayings of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, ethical hadith and sermons of the Prophet Muhammad, Fatimid and Tayyibi Bohra poetry, history, theology, and law, literary features and symbolic exegesis of the Qur’an, classical Arabic women’s literature, and the history, functions, and literary genres of Arabic in India.
Professor Qutbuddin has published five books: In 2024, she completed an edition and translation of the preeminent tenth-century compilation of the words of Ali ibn Abi Talib entitled Nahj al-Balaghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAli (Brill 2024, Open Access), for which she was presented the 2025 Sheikh Hamad Translation Award (Doha, Qatar). The Shi’a Research Institute is proud to have sponsored open access to this work, which makes it available for download at no cost. She has also previously published two monographs, Al-Muʾayyad al-Shīrāzī and Fatimid Daʿwa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Brill 2005), and Arabic Oration: Art and Function (Brill 2019), for which she won the 2021 Shaykh Zayed Book Prize (Abu Dhabi, UAE). She has also edited and translated two medieval ethical compilations entitled A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons and Teachings of ʿAli (NYU 2013), and Light in the Heavens: Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (NYU 2016).
Currently, she is working on a monograph on Ali’s life, teachings, and eloquence, supported by the Leverhulme Foundation (United Kingdom).
Her earlier scholarship has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Professor Qutbuddin is originally from Mumbai, India. She completed her BA and Tamhidi MA at Ain Shams University, Cairo, and her PhD at Harvard University.
Before Chicago, she taught briefly at Yale University and the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.