Professor Omid Safi

Omid Safi is an associate professor of Islamic Studies at University  of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.   He specializes on contemporary Islamic thought, and medieval Islamic history.    He is the Chair for the Study of Islam at the American Academy of Religion, the largest international organization devoted to the academic study of religion.

Omid was born in the US, but has spent half of his life living in various Muslim countries, such as Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and India.   His family originally comes from the city of Esfahan in Iran.     His understanding of religion is shaped both by the pluralistic Sufi dimension of Islam as well as the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Having witnesses the Iranian revolution and the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war personally, Omid is deeply committed to exploring possibilities of nonviolent struggle within the Islamic tradition.

Omid has been nominated six times at Colgate for the "Professor of  the Year" award, and before that twice at Duke University for the Distinguished Lecturer award.

He is the editor of the volume Progressive Muslims:  On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford:  Oneworld Publications, 2003).   In this volume, he brought together fifteen Muslim scholars and activists to imagine a new understanding of Islam which is rooted in social justice, gender equality, and religious/ethnic pluralism. His work Islam and the Politics of Knowledge, dealing with medieval Islamic history and politics, was published by  UNC Press in 2006.   He has written three books, over 30 articles and some 75 encyclopedia entries and book reviews.  He has been featured a number of times on NPR, Associated Press, CNN, NBC, and other national and international media.