9th Night of Muharram

Ali-Reza Bhojani’s core research interests focus around theological and ethical issues within Islamic legal theory. He joined the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology to work with Dr Morgan Clarke on an OUP John Fell Fund Project that is examining the lived experience of Sharia amongst Muslims in the U.K. As well as aiming to broaden academic and public understandings of Sharia, they  seek to explore how the actual practice of Sharia relates to diverse Islamic intellectual traditions as well as broader questions in philosophy of law, ethics and anthropology.

Before coming to Oxford, Ali-Reza developed and taught courses on ‘Islamic Ethics’ and ‘Islamic Theology and Philosophy’ at the University of Nottingham where he continues to be an Honorary Research Fellow in Theology and Religious Studies. This followed over five years as a leading part of the research and teaching team at Al-Mahdi Institute, Birmingham. His doctoral work (Durham, 2013) focussed on the role of non-scriptural judgements of morality as a source of Sharia within Shi’i thought and was published as Moral Rationalism and Shari’a: A Study of Independent Rationality in Modern Shi’i Usul al-fiqh (Routledge, 2015). Amongst his current projects is a co-edited volume being prepared for Brill and titled Visions of Shari’a: Contemporary Discussions in Shi’i Legal Theory.

Ali-Reza is an elected council member of the British Association of Islamic Studies, and a member of Durham University’s Islam, Law and Modernity Research Cluster. Ali-Reza contributes regularly to a variety of outreach and knowledge exchange activities and is a practicing optometrist.