Courses
Topics in Islamic: Conceptualizing Islam; Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean World, 1100-1650; Islamic History, 622-1200; Introduction to Islamic Civilization; Sufis: God's Friends in Islam

Research Interests

History of Sufism

Professor Karamustafa already has several ongoing essay-length research projects on various Sufi and Sufism-related topics at different levels of development. More broadly, he is interested in exploring the possibility of writing an integrated and thematically organized historical overview of post-classical Sufism (from the thirteenth century onwards) as a joint project with a small group of colleagues.

Islam and the Mediterranean World

Professor Karamustafa recently drafted an essay on the historiography of the relationship between Islam and Latin Christendom. He is interested in developing new ways of 'framing' the comparative and eventually fully integrated study of Christians, Muslims and Jews around the Mediterranean, especially during the Islamic Earlier Middle Period (ca. 1250-1500). Specifically, he would like to view this period through the prisms of history of science, history of conceptions of 'religion' and 'civilization,' as well as history of particular modes of piety, such as various forms of asceticism and mysticism, in order to explore the interactive history of the 'transcultural space' between Islam and Europe in the early modern period.

History of the Concept of Religion & History of the Modern Construction of Islam as a Religion

During the past several years, Professor Karamustafa has been reading and teaching on theory and method in the study of religion. He pays special attention to the history of the study of religion, and more particularly, is interested in the emergence of the modern Western concept of religion, and the subsequent universal application of this new concept to non-Western, especially Islamic, contexts. In a future book project he plans to probe the history of the concept of religion, or rather, the history of its cognates like dîn and milla, in Islam under the tentative title Islamic Perspectives on Religion.

Selected Publications:

Sufism: The Formative Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (currently in press, forthcoming February 2007).

God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200-1550. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994. Paperback reprint: Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

Vāīdī’s Menākıb-i Hvoca-i Cihān ve Netīce-i Cān: Critical Edition and Historical Analysis. Sources of Oriental Languages and Literatures, 17; Turkish Sources, 15. Cambridge, Mass.: The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1993.

Assistant Editor, The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies. General editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992

“Origins of Anatolian Sufism.” In Sufism and Sufis in Ottoman Society: Sources, Doctrine, Rituals, Turuq, Architecture, Literature and Fine Arts, Modernism, 67-95. Edited by Ahmet Yaşar Ocak. Ankara: Turkish Historical Society, 2005.

“Walāyah according to al-Junayd (d.910).” In Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought [in honor of Hermann Landolt], 62-68. Edited by Todd Lawson. London: The Institute of Ismaili Studies in association with I. B. Tauris, 2005.