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Ph.D. – A. Z. Obiedat

Area of Specialization: Arabic Language and Literature, Islamic Thought, Middle Eastern Philosophy, and Modern Arab Intellectual History.

For eighteen years, he taught full time, offering eighty-four courses in Arabic, Philosophy, and Middle Eastern history and literature at the University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, and Grinnell College. During that period, he published two academic books and fourteen peer-reviewed articles and chapters (in both Arabic and English), and delivered more than twenty conference presentations. In terms of administrative responsibilities, from 2011 to 2015 he directed the Arabic Language and Culture Program at the University of Virginia, which comprised six faculty members and enrolled over 400 students annually. He also led the 80-student residential Shea Language House at the University of Virginia from 2007 to 2015, as well as the Wake Forest University Arabic Summer Program in Morocco in 2019.

He was trained within two distinct academic communities: the English-speaking world and the Arab world. He first became an Arabist through training in classical Islamic scholastic disciplines, including jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalām), and mysticism (al-taṣawwuf). Becoming an Arabist, in turn, enabled him to develop into an Islamologist by granting him hermeneutical insight into the Islamic scripture—its rival poetic and narrative dimensions, and its socio-historical horizon. Because of this dual intellectual formation, his research specialization reflects an interest both in contemporary analytic and science-oriented philosophies, as articulated by Nicholas Rescher (1928–2024) and Mario Bunge (1919–2020), and in the classical Arab scholasticisms that underlie the intellectual horizon of current Arab ideological movements and the challenges they face in the modern Arab world.