Safiyyah El-Gamal

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.