Tarek Masoud

Khaled manuscriptProfessor Khaled El-Rouayheb

Faculty Director, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program
Chair, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and Islamic Intellectual History

 
Khaled El-Rouayheb is James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History at the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University. His research interests include: the intellectual and cultural history of the Arabic-Islamic world in the early-modern period (1500-1800); the history of Arabic logic; Islamic theology and philosophy. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), a MA in Middle Eastern History from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), and a PhD (2003) in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). He has been a Junior Research Fellow of the British Academy (2003-2006), a Junior Mellon Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2008-2009), and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2011-12).

His publications include the four monographs:  The Development of Arabic Logic, 1200-1800 (Schwabe Verlag 2019), Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Relational Syllogisms & the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900 (Brill, 2010); and Before Homosexuality in the Arabic-Islamic World, 1500-1800 (University of Chicago Press, 2005). He has also co-edited (with Sabine Schmidtke) the Oxford Handbook of Islamic Philosophy (Oxford University Press 2916). His edition with introduction of Kashf al-asrar ‘an ghawamid al-afkar by Afdal al-Din al-Khunaji (d.1248), published by the Iranian Institute for Philosophy (2010), was selected in 2011 as the distinguished book by the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

Courses

Publication

Tarek Masoud. 1/2015. “Has The Door Closed on Arab Democracy?” Journal of Democracy, 26, 1, Pp. 74-87. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, democracy in the Arab world seems farther away today than at any point in the last 25 years, leaving one to conclude that the answer to the question posed in this special anniversary issue of the Journal—“Is Democracy in Decline?”—is, at least in the case of the Arab world, a resounding, even deafening, yes. If democracy is to ever arrive in the region, it will likely be through an evolutionary and elite-driven process.
Tarek Masoud. 6/2014. Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt. Cambridge University Press. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Why does Islam seem to dominate Egyptian politics, especially when the country's endemic poverty and deep economic inequality would seem to render it promising terrain for a politics of radical redistribution rather than one of religious conservativism? This book argues that the answer lies not in the political unsophistication of voters, the subordination of economic interests to spiritual ones, or the ineptitude of secular and leftist politicians, but in organizational and social factors that shape the opportunities of parties in authoritarian and democratizing systems to reach potential voters. Tracing the performance of Islamists and their rivals in Egyptian elections over the course of almost forty years, this book not only explains why Islamists win elections, but illuminates the possibilities for the emergence in Egypt of the kind of political pluralism that is at the heart of what we expect from democracy.