Mairaj U. Syed, Guest Contributor

Mairaj U. Syed is associate professor of religious studies, director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, and affiliated faculty with the Graduate Group in Computer Science at UC Davis. He has published in the fields of Islamic law, theology, comparative ethics, hadith literature, and digital humanities. His monograph, Coercion and Responsibility in Islam, published with Oxford University Press in 2016, is a comparative and historical examination of ethical and moral problems coercion raises about responsibility for one’s action. It offers a new model for analyzing ethical thought produced by intellectuals working within traditions in a competitive pluralistic environment. With his colleague Joel Blecher, he translated Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s treatise on the plague, Merits of the Plague. His latest research, involving interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars from around the world, examines the efficacy of computational methods (e.g., NLP, machine learning, AI) in yielding meaningful insights for the analysis of Islamic texts, particularly hadith. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research on hadith, including the University of California, Davis Academic Senate Large Grant and the Middle Ages in the Wider World Summer research grant. In 2014, he was a Fulbright scholar in Istanbul, Turkey. At the University of California, Davis, he teaches a wide variety of classes in Islamic Studies, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Digital Humanities and Social Theory. In addition to his research and teaching, he is active in various American Muslim civil society organizations and has been retained as an expert witness in legal cases involving Islamic law and Muslims in the United States. He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin.