Professor Rob Gleave

Rob Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. From January 2023 until January 2026 he will be British Academy/Wolfson Professor with the research project “The Foundations of Modern Shi’ism: The End of Akhbrism and the Beginnings of Ulism”. His CV is here and his publications list is here.

His 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.

Until September 2022, he was Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam (CSI) and Director of the International Institute for Cultural Enquiry (IICE).

His most recent research projects, both of which concluded in 2022, 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 supervised include:

• Debating al-kimiyyah and Takfr in Salafism
• A critical approach to the origins and evolution of Usl al-Fiqh and the methodologies of interpretation and inference, with a case of hijb
• Understanding the Salafi Doctrine of al-Wal wal-Bara
• The Conceptualisation of Power in the thought of Muammad usayn Faalallh
• The Theory of Maqid al-Shara in Sh jurisprudence: Muammad Taq al-Mudarris as a Model
• al-Qawid al-Fiqhiyya in Contemporary Islamic Law
• A study on Murabah in Islamic law and its application in Malaysian Islamic banks
• Necessity (arra) in Islamic law : a study with special reference to the Harm Reduction programme in Malaysia
• A critical edition of Qawid al-Taawwuf by Amad Zarrq (d. 899/1493) with an introduction