Dr Kumail Rajani

Kumail Rajani is the Imam Sajjad Chair in Shii Studies and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. Although his primary research focuses on the origins and development of hadith corpora, his interests extend to Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic law and legal theory, South Asian studies, Ismaili studies, and Shi‘i studies more broadly. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2019–2022) on the Law, Authority and Learning in Shiite Islam project, an Advanced Grant (no. 695245) funded by the European Research Council. He has published several articles and has both edited and co-edited scholarly volumes. Rajani spent a number of years in the Shi‘i seminary (ḥawza) of Qum, studying and teaching classical Islamic texts in hadith, fiqh, and Islamic legal theory. He is the recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies (2022), a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023–2026), a Templeton Fellowship (2025), and the Zahid Ali Fellowship.