Omar is originally from Giza, Egypt. He is an MA candidate in Islamic Studies at Columbia University, having joined as a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship. Omar completed his undergraduate degree in Islamic Studies at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Following his graduation, he worked as a researcher at Egypt’s Dar Al-Ifta. His academic interests include Islamic legal history, the anthropology of Islamic law, uṣūl al-fiqh, legal reform in Egypt, state and religious institutions, and Islamic political theory.

Natasha Shahid was born and raised in Pakistan, where she earned an MA in History with distinction and an MPhil in Asian Studies. She would like to describe herself as a historian of the medieval Middle East, along with her native South Asia, and her primary area of focus as the history of the early Nizārī Ismā'īlis - also known as the 'Order of the Assassins' - on which she has produced one thesis, an academic paper, as well as several newspaper features, so far. Natasha also has several years of teaching experience, along with a decade in journalism in which she wrote, edited, researched, and published extensively. 

At Columbia MEI, she has continued to explore the history of the early Nizārī Ismā'īlis, working with the famed Ilkhānid historical compilations, the Jāmi' al-Tawārīkh and the Zubdat al-Tawārīkh for her Islamic Studies MA thesis. Apart from these valuable texts, she is also exploring the material culture of the Nizārī Ismā'īlīs of Alamūt, with hopes of enhancing our understanding of this thus far largely misunderstood polity.

In addition to her primary area of interest, Natasha is also interested in Quranic hermeneutics, the place of outer space in Islamic scripture, and - being a mom of two - the ethics of parenting in Islam. She welcomes all interaction and discussion on these topics, and can be reached at her academia.edu profile, here.

Alsya Feydra is an MA candidate in Islamic Studies at Columbia University from Bogor, Indonesia. She received her Bachelor of Humanities in Arabic Studies from Universitas Indonesia last Fall; her thesis focuses on how various aspects of Islamic traditions interact and overlap in present-day popular culture. The representation and identity of Muslims in digital media, particularly those of Southeast Asian Muslims, is one of her main research interests. She’s also passionate about the multiculturalism of Islam in Indonesia, believing that Southeast Asian Muslims are not only exciting research objects but also deserve to be the ones conducting said research themselves. One of the main goals that she hopes to accomplish by pursuing graduate study at Columbia is to help fill in the existing gap in international academia of SEA Muslim women scholars. In her spare time, she likes to watch dramas with her family and do karaoke.

Rizka Azelia graduated from the Islamic State University of Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta, Indonesia with a bachelor in Islamic Family Law. Her undergraduate thesis was about the customary Inheritance system in Lohayong, East Flores, Indonesia. In the future, she plans to conduct more research on marriage and Family in Indonesia.

Chikako Hori is an MA candidate in Islamic Studies at Columbia University. She is a diplomat trainee from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan. Before coming to New York, she studied Arabic for 2 years in Cairo. She holds an MSc in Culture and Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she researched Muslims in Europe. She has also completed a BA in Law from Kyoto University. 

Ella is an incoming MA candidate in Islamic Studies at Columbia University. She graduated the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a dual degree in Middle East Studies and Political Science. Ella took extensive courses in Arabic language as part of her degree. Throughout her BA she researched the impact the separation wall has on the lives of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. 

Over the past year and a half, Ella has been working at the U.N as the spokesperson of the Israeli Ambassador. Her areas of interest are conflicts in modern Middle East, with a focus on the impact Islam has on decision making of Arab and Muslim states in foreign policy, specifically when it comes to the state of Israel. Ella is 26, married to Zev, with whom she currently lives in NYC. 

Maria is from Delhi, India. She completed her BSc in Physics from Delhi University and her post-graduate studies in Islam from Jamia Hamdard, Delhi. Her thesis explains that Islamic daʿwah differs from proselytization, and can be understood as a dialogue on spirituality and the purpose of life. She studied Arabic at Qasid Institute in Jordan. Maria’s videos on social media have garnered millions of views. She was featured in a Discovery Channel documentary on Islam and interreligious relations.

At Columbia University, Maria is pursuing further graduate studies to understand the relevance of the Islamic faith and intellectual heritage to the present age. Her research interests include peace in Islam, intellectual challenges posed to Islam by modernity, political interpretation of Islam, and Islamic philosophy and modern science. She aims to explore eastern and Judaeo-Christian religious traditions, seeking opportunities for interfaith dialogue. Currently, Maria is translating Maulana Wahiduddin Khan’s Muṭālaʿah-i Ḥadīth (Prophetic Wisdom) from Urdu into English.

Jaehoon Jung is an incoming candidate for the MA in Islamic studies from the Republic of South Korea. Jaehoon is completing a BA from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) located in Seoul, in the department of Persian and Iranian studies, with a minor in Arabic. As a student who has been interested in Islamic Jurisprudence and its formation, Jaehoon’s primary interest is development of Islamic Jurisprudence, legal principles (Usul al-Fiqh), and contemporary Maqasid discourses, as well as the formative history of Shi'ite Islam.

Elizabeth Hazelton graduated from Baylor University in Waco, Texas with majors in International Studies, Arabic and Middle East Studies. During her undergraduate studies she interned with the U.S. Department of State with the Yemen Affairs Unit and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Her research interests include women, gender and sexuality in Saudi Arabia.

Mahe-Noor Baig is a student in the Islamic Studies MA program at Columbia University. Born and raised in Queens, she holds a Juris Doctorate from the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. As a first generation Pakistani-American female attorney, her primary research interests are in Sharia law and Islamic jurisprudence, women's rights under Sharia law, and how different cultures and societies have shaped women's rights using Islamic law.

Ibrahim Buyukcelebi

Davide Zurlo studied Arabic and Hebrew at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Kent. He specializes in geopolitics of the Middle East and North Africa region. He travelled extensively between Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran and Qatar, and he speaks Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, English, French, and Italian.

Widad Khokhar is an incoming ISMA student at Columbia University. She recently graduated from Dickinson College where she double-majored in Philosophy and Political Science. While in undergrad Khokhar spent a summer working for WHO in Lahore, Pakistan where she worked with the local community to encourage children’s immunizations. She also worked to stop the spread of misinformation encouraging vaccine hesitancy by various religious groups. After Khokhar’s return to the United States she was a judicial intern in Pennsylvania where she discovered her interest in the intersectionality of American and Islamic law.

Kayvan Seyedin is a first-generation Iranian-American from San Diego, CA and born and raised in Milwaukee, WI. He graduated summa cum laude with Department Honors in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. His thesis focused on the recent recirculation and pedagogical mobilization of Iranian-French artist Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical film Persepolis (2007) in the aftermath of Iran's 2022 women-led uprisings. Deploying an anti-Orientalist and anti-Islamophobic framework, his research examines the knowledges codified in Persepolis about Iranian women, men, and post-revolutionary Iran in particular, and Muslim women, men, and collectivities more generally, as well as the discursive effects produced by the film's treatment as an ethnographic work. 

Kayvan's research interests are deeply informed by his Iranian-American background and Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. He is specifically interested in exploring self-representations produced by Iranian women filmmakers in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema in order to understand how women's identities are simultaneously negotiated and resist hegemonic discourses about Muslim women's oppression. Kayvan's broader research interests include the emergence of Shia liberation theology, political Islam, and manifestations of Islamic modernity in post-revolutionary Iran. 

Usman Khan is a Queer, Muslim, Pakistani-Canadian graduate from York University, Toronto. His undergraduate degree was a Specialized Honours BA in History where he focused on the intersection between the Middle East, religion, and gender and sexuality studies.

Motivated by his own experiences and observations of Queer Muslims and South Asian youth, Usman aspires to become a historical scholar, contributing to and expanding youth access to research in these areas. He combines rigorous research and theoretical background with his personal perspective as both an outsider and insider to the cultures he explores. With a northern Pakistani background and Canadian upbringing, Usman brings a unique skill set in languages such as English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, while further intending to soon include Farsi.

Usman's focus is on the region between Kabul and Delhi, specifically examining how Islam influenced gender and sexual norms during the later Delhi Sultanate and early Mughal Empire from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

Safi is from Weddington, NC and recently graduated from Davidson College. She spent many memorable hours with the Religious and Arab Studies departments, discussing pre-modern mysticism interacting with modern consciousness. Her undergraduate thesis thus utilized Ibn Arabi’s Futuhat al-Makiyya as a method of identifying the spiritual flattening in Osama bin Laden’s transcripts. 

Safi has studied Arabic with Qasid, Middlebury, and HDS. Further, her travels to Morocco taught the art of not only calligraphy but also daarija and old medina bartering. Returning to Rabat with the Pulitzer Center, she reported on the story of youth’s mystic and social culture in a new lingual age. In the next couple years, Safi hopes to continue research on mystic thought in a modern political context as a FLAS fellow in the dual MA program.

Margaret Sawyer graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in Spanish and International Affairs and a minor in Arabic. During her time at UNH, she interned for the Department of State, where she co-managed an interactive platform for the US Embassy in Libya’s External Office. In her undergraduate thesis, Margaret explored how the Spanish tourism industry frames the country’s Islamic heritage, focusing particularly on Andalusia. As an MA candidate for the Columbia/Aga Khan dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures, she seeks to understand how politics and religion shape cultural and heritage preservation in the Middle East.

Herman Lim Bin Adam Lim is the recipient of the Aga Khan Fellowship for the Columbia/Aga Khan Dual MA Program in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. He is particularly interested in the multiple expressions of Muslimness across the Indian Ocean, and the connections engendered between its littoral regions throughout time. He focuses primarily on Southeast Asia, stressing its importance as an integral (rather than peripheral) region in the wider conversation on the Muslim World.

Prior to this program, Herman received his MA in Asian Studies from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where he studied the construction of Muslim identity in Malaya and Singapore in the realm of film, literature, and ephemera in the twentieth century, under his advisor Dr. Barbara Watson Andaya. He intends to explore pre-modern and early modern expressions of Muslimness, especially in relation to Sufism and the occult sciences, during his time at Columbia and the Aga Khan University.

Ellie Harris is from New Palestine, Indiana. Before coming to Columbia, Ellie studied philosophy at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Ellie is particularly interested in Sufism and Islamic philosophy, especially in South Asia.

Sofie Leathers, from Delray Beach, Florida, is pursuing a career in Arabic language education with a research focus in Islamic science and philosophy. She is an MA candidate for the Columbia/Aga Khan dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. In her undergraduate thesis at Middlebury College, Sofie produced an original translation of a sample of a 10th-century, occult-scientific agronomical text. In her current position as a scholar-intern at Roots Academy in Rabat, Sofie designs educational programming, including a Sufism-themed trip around Morocco and a workshop series on higher education in the U.S. For two years, she has facilitated virtual English classes for students in rural Morocco with Yallah Al-Quds, an English-Arabic linguistic and cultural exchange platform she helped launch.

Muhammed Khaleel, from Calicut, South India, is an MA candidate for the Columbia/Aga Khan dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. He holds a BA in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Calicut. He has also completed an undergraduate degree in Islamic Studies from Jamia Madeenathunnoor, Calicut, where he was trained in the Shāfi’ī and Asha’rī Islamic texts. He has also worked as a research assistant at Malaibar Foundation for Research and Development, Calicut, where he gained hands-on experience in Muslim manuscripts from Malabar, further deepening his knowledge and expertise in the field. His areas of interest include Occult sciences, Manuscript cultures, history of science, food history, and Cultural Anthropology.

Alaa Qarooni is a Bahraini MA candidate for the Columbia/Aga Khan dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. He first moved to the United States from Bahrain to pursue a bachelors degree in electrical engineering, but quickly found himself drawn to exploring the educational streamline taken by Arab youth in the gulf as they navigate the complicated dynamics of postcolonial, oil-rich Arab states, a streamline which he believes he himself is a product of. His interests deal with the disconnect between the hegemonic cultural imaginary of the state and the grim reality of youth on the ground. What do standard talking points like ‘economic development’ and ‘building for a knowledge economy’ mean when faced with a near future of economic recession and environmental catastrophe? How do youth conceptualize ‘the future’ when so-called modernization efforts are undertaken without their interests in mind? How does our understanding of Islam in the Middle East, as scholars, evolve when we consider the role of education and youth in constructing it, historically and contemporaneously? Alaa hopes to develop his expertise in order to attribute greater value to youth culture in academic discourse on Islam and the Middle East.

Alae El Ouazzani is an architect born and raised in Morocco, and a graduate of the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture of Paris (ESA) in France. Her main research interest revolves around Pre-Islamic influences on North African Contemporary Architecture with a focus on the impact of the colonial period. In exploring this thesis, Alae aims to develop a more expansive understanding of North African heritage beyond the prism of orientalism and other Eurocentric biases. Past research projects include examining the urban history of Moroccan cities, taking into consideration the impact of popular beliefs in urban morphologies. During her field work she traced and documented the evolution of historical sites in Rabat, such as Sidi Yabouri Saint Evora cemetery, home to handcrafted stonework, on the deserted tombs of the first inhabitants of the city. The research revealed her life-long commitment to become a researcher in the field of historic preservation, hoping to have an impact on the becoming of cities in emerging countries such as her own, Morocco. Language is an important part in the way she approaches research, asare the way Arabic, French, English, and Spanish shapes her work and her sensory exploration of spaces and temporalities.

Yusuf Umrethwala is an MA candidate in the dual degree program in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures at Columbia University and Aga Khan University (London). He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at Aljamea-tus-Saifiyah in Surat, India, with a major in Arabic literature (ʾAdab), and went on to lecture and research at the same university.

His past research interests include the expression of emotional intensity and visceral imagery by the use of lingual derivations in the poems of Ṭayyībī-Ismaʿīlī Laureates of Yemen in the 13th century. In a more recent project, his research focused on the study of the trans-national socio-religious migratory history of his community, the Dawoodi Bohras starting from the early 19th century to the present day, his findings on which were recently self-published in a book entitled Travel and You Shall Prosper: The History of Migrations of the Dawoodi Bohras. This book covers the migratory history of the Dawoodi Bohras to over 40 countries from India across 9 geographical regions with a detailed account of the early migrants and community developments. Since nothing of this kind was previously documented, his work mostly relied on oral histories and ethnographic research, and is also complemented with a rich collection of old images and archives, each of which tells and complements the vivid history of migrations. He hopes to deepen his research and use his Master's experience to enrich and publish this work. He has also studied and written on the iconography of an old wooden artifact belonging to the Western Fatimid Palace in Cairo. 

With his past research experiences in the history and literature of the Fatimid dynasty, he was always amazed by the significance of geniza documents in complementing the existing scholarship from a bottom-up approach and providing an evidentiary basis for the social history of the period. For the past two years, he has been working as a research assistant at the Princeton Geniza lab where he works primarily on Arabic script documents coupled with his limited and growing Judaeo-Arabic experience. He is currently working on updating the DIMME database. He is presently a visiting scholar at Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department where he is writing his dissertation on Fatimid petitions under the supervision of Professor Marina Rustow. To know more about his research, contact him at ymu2101@columbia.edu.

Cimone Rajan, a 23-year old full-time singer and songwriter, graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2019 with a songwriting degree and music technology minor. Her interest in Islamic Studies grew progressively while she was at Berklee after participating in the Berklee Study Abroad Program in Valencia, Spain. After experiencing the rich cultural impact of the medieval Muslim world on Spanish and Mediterranean art and culture, Cimone decided to tailor her songwriting degree towards the exploration of Muslim culture, along with her own heritage as a Middle Eastern and Pakistani-Canadian. This pursuit eventually led to her upcoming debut EP (album), “after the rain”; a sonic blend of RnB and Sufi sounds. During the dual-degree MA program at Columbia and the ISMC, Cimone plans to work at the intersection of Muslim art and culture and women of the Muslim world, to better understand and study the underpinnings of their historical influences in shaping modern culture globally. She is excited to continue exploring the connection between Islam and the arts, with a hope to introducea new narrative as a Muslim artist in the western music industry.

Fareah Fysudeen is an MA candidate for the Columbia and Aga Khan University dual degree in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. She holds a BA in Philosophy and English with Creative Writing sub-concentration from the University of Michigan.

George comes to the dual degree program between Columbia and the Aga Khan Institute after having completed his juris Doctor at the St. John’s University School of Law. During his time at St. John’s, his coursework focused on private and public international law, cross border transactions, and national security. A portion of his scholarly writing requirement discussing the status of the international legal framework governing the Mekong River Basin was published in the first quarter 2020 edition of Benedict’s Maritime Bulletin. In addition to his academic work, George was a Teaching Assistant for the St. Johns’ Transnational Legal Practice Program, whose purpose is to instruct non-U.S. legal practitioners and students in the nuances of legal practice across borders. Before attending law school, George graduated with a B.A. in History with dual minors in French and Economics, with honors, from Fairleigh Dickinson University College at Florham. His undergraduate thesis explored the development and crystallization of Shari’ah commercial law, and how this process differed from the development of commercial law in Europe.

George's research interests relate to understanding political and diplomatic structures in the Persianate Islamic world, and how these affected the development of transboundary activities during the pre-modern period. He is also interested in understanding how historical patterns can serve as an analogy for modern economic development and integration.

Shireen Zaineb is an MA candidate for the Columbia University and Aga Khan Institute dual-degree program in Islamic Studies and Muslim Cultures. She graduated from Macalester College in 2020, where she studied International Studies with a focus in Political Science, as well as Media & Cultural Studies. With a strong passion for archival exploration, she is dedicated to shedding light on the past to inform a more informed present and future.