Comings & Goings
Behnam Sadeki
The Department of Religious Studies has hired a scholar with expertise in Islamic studies to teach in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Behnam Sadeki received his doctorate in May in Near Eastern studies (Islamic religion) at Princeton University and has been hired as an assistant professor of religious studies within the Abbasi program.
"All who came to know Dr. Behnam Sadeki in the course of last year's wide search for a first-rate scholar of Islam are delighted that he has accepted a position in the Religious Studies Department, confident that his research and teaching will figure importantly in the multi-departmental Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies within the School of Humanities and Sciences," said Robert Gregg, professor of religious studies and acting director of the Abbasi program. "An expert in Islam's first two centuries—the history and literature and thought of this early and formative period—Sadeki's presence not only strengthens the study of religions at Stanford but also contributes to Stanford's range of academic research and course offerings concerning Muslim societies, past and present."
Sadeki will teach courses on classical Islamic theology and classical Islamic law in the fall quarter and a course on the Qur'an in the winter quarter for the department. He also will co-teach a course with Gregg called Approaching Religion: Tradition, Transformation and the Challenge of the Present. Sadeki will arrive on campus later this month.
The university received $9 million in September 2003 to endow the Abbasi program and professorship in Islamic studies to help increase knowledge of the Muslim world. More than one-quarter of the world's population is Muslim and yet there is little understanding of Islam in the country, President John Hennessy said when he announced the endowment.
The program, which does not grant degrees, is organized to provide students with a wide geopolitical lens and a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing literature, history, politics, religion, law, sociology and anthropology.