Professor Rob Gleave

Rob Gleave FBA is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. From January 2023 until January 2027 he is British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbarism and the Beginnings of Usulism”. His CV is here and his publications list is here. He leads two current research projects:

1. SDIL: Schooling and Deschooling Islamic Law: Histories of the Madhhabs - it is a collaboration between the University of Exeter, the Complutense University (Madrid), the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Humboldt Unviersity of Berlin. It is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and runs from 2024 to 2026.

2. WATSUS: Water, Tradition and Sustainability Adaption and Change in Arid Environments: the Omani Falaj
System - a collaborative project with my colleagues as co-investigators: John Cooper (Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology & Arabic, University of Exeter) and Abdallah Al-Ghafri (Professor of the UNESCO Chair on Aflaj Studies and Socio-hydrology, Unvieristy of Nizwa). It is funded by the National Geographic Society.

He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2026.

Rob Gleave's research focuses on Islamic legal theory and practice, particularly legal hermeneutics, and the history of Shi’ite legal thought and institutions. He has directed a number of international research projects over the past 20 years exploring these issues. Details of his publications and projects can be found via the "publications" and "research" tabs on this page.

He has been Director of the IAIS's Centre for the Study of Islam (CSI) and the Unviersity of Exeter's Director of the International Institute for Cultural Enquiry (IICE).

His most recent research projects were:

• Law, Authority and Learning in Imami Shi’ite Islam (www.lawalisi.eu) was a 6-year project (2016-2022) funded by the European Research Council (as an Advanced Award) aims to integrate the study of Imami Shi’ite law into the broader field of Islamic legal studies. The project appointed two postdoctoral research fellows for its first phase (2016-2019 - Drs Paul Gledhill and Wissam Halawi), and in its second phase,research fellows have included Drs Cameron Zargar (2019-2020), Amin Ehteshami (2019-2020), Raha Rafii and Kumail Rajani (2019-2022), Pooya Razavian and Omar Anchassi (2021-2022). The team was also joined at certain points by Dr Belal Alabbas, the British Academy Newton International Fellow based at the University of Exeter.
• Islamic Law on the Edge was a collaborative, one year (2021-2022) project with Dr Adday Hernandez-Lopez of Complutense University, Madrid, examining neglected and marginalised areas of Islamic legal studies. The project organised workshops, networking events and a doctoral sudent summer school. The Research Assistant on this project was Ms Shahanaz Begum.

His past research projects have included:

Understanding Shari’a: Past Present Imperfect Present; this two-year project (2016-2018) was funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area consortium as part of the “Uses of the Past” programme.

Islamic Reformulations: Belief, Governance, Violence, a 3-year project (2013-16) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council examining questions around the reformulation of notions of belief, governance and their relationship to violence in contemporary Islamic thought.

Legitimate and Illegitimate Violence in Islamic Thought (www.livitproject.net) was a 3-year programme (2010-2013) funded by the ESRC examining how violence has been justified in Islamic intellectual history of Islam, and has produced the series of the same name, published by Edinburgh University Press.

Rob Gleave has been visiting fellow or scholar at the universities of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Oxford, Washington (Seattle), Meiji (Tokyo), Tehran, Chicago and at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton.

Within the University of Exeter, as well being Director of the International Institute for Cultural Enquiry and Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam, he has also been: Associate Dean of the College for Social Science and International Studies 2015-16 and Principal Investigator on the University of Exeter ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (ESRC-IAA) from 2014 to 2018.

Other information:

Rob Gleave serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals and is sub-editor of Islamic Law and Society and the Journal of Abbasid Studies. Amongst his appointments, he has been Executive Director of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Secretary and President of the British Institute of Persian Studies, and President and Secretary of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies. He was also chair of the Steering Group for Islamic Studies, 2008-2011, a precursor to the British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS).

Research supervision:

Postgraduate research topics I have recently supervised include:

• The Legal and Ethical Status of Embryos in Islam
• al-Qawa'id al-Fiqhiyya in Contemporary Islamic Law
• Misplaced Methodologies: The Legal Hermeneutics of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānῑ (d.189/804)
• Islamic Legal Evaluation of the Current Legislation on the Establishment, Operation and the Sales of Entrepreneur’s Shares of Venture Capital Companies