Faculty

Research Overview

Abdulbasit Kassim is the James P. Wilmot Distinguished Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. He specializes in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a particular focus on the Islamic written heritage in Arabic and African languages. His research examines how African Muslims interpreted the theological, legal, and mystical traditions of Islam and the social worlds through which their pedagogical practices and hermeneutics circulated and acquired new meanings across the early modern and modern periods. More broadly, he is interested in the intellectual networks and transregional scholarly communities that connected Muslim West Africa to other regions of the Muslim world in the Islamic West (al-Andalus and the Maghrib), the Islamic East (Mashriq) and the African Diaspora in the Atlantic world and Mediterranean Lands of Islam.

Kassim’s current book project, Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450–2015, tells the history of the early modern formation and colonial reconfiguration of an Islamicate intellectual and political order. The book traces the longue durée of successive waves of Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad. Drawing on close readings of texts by Maghrebi and West African scholars in manuscript and print, the book examines Islamic intellectual history, scholarly curricula, textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that informed the debates about correct belief (al-ʿaqāʾid al-ṣaḥīḥa), the faith of ordinary Muslims (ʿaqīdat al-ʿawāmm), the principles of anathematization (thawābit al-takfīr), the ordinances of Islamic governance (al-aḥkām al-sulṭāniyyah), the jurisprudence of jihad and governance grounded in Islamic law (fiqh al-jihād wa-l-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya) and religious renewal (tajdīd). Requiem for a West African Caliphate investigates the divergent Islamic reformist impulses, messianic politics, sacred rebellions, and nostalgia for the revival of the Islamic Caliphate that sought not only to recover the past but also to remake it.

Kassim received his PhD from Rice University and additional training in the Arabic intellectual heritage of Islamic Africa at the Sankore’ Institute of Islamic-African Studies International (SIIASI). Before joining the University of Rochester, he held predoctoral, postdoctoral, and provostial fellowships at Northwestern University, the University of California, Riverside, New York University, and Stanford University. His research has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the African Studies Association, among others. He has conducted research in Arabic manuscript libraries in Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Senegal, Sudan, Algeria, and Morocco.

Research Interests

• Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies
• Islamic History and Civilization
• Islamic Thought
• African and African Diaspora Islamic Intellectual Traditions
• Arabic and Ajami Literature of Africa