Malika Zeghal Named Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor

Cambridge, Mass. - June 3, 2010 - Malika Zeghal, who has examined the changing relationship between Islam and governments across the Middle East, has been appointed Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2010.

Zeghal is currently associate professor of the anthropology and sociology of religion at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2005. She joins Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Committee on the Study of Religion.

"Professor Zeghal’s scholarship is grounded in her remarkable ability to win the trust and confidence of the Islamic religious actors about whom she writes," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Her ethnographic approach, based on her interviews, fieldwork, and reconstruction of the biographies of key players in the Arab world, gives her work remarkable power. An excellent and versatile teacher at Chi-cago, she will no doubt become a fine colleague and a great asset to us here at Harvard."

Zeghal’s research focuses on the changing relationship between Arab states, religious institutions, and Islamist movements over the last 50 years. Starting with her Ph.D. thesis on the leaders and scholars of al-Azhar University in Cairo, her work has shown how the ulama have regained a significant role in the formulation of religious knowledge and norms in the last part of the 20th century.

Zeghal’s first book, Gardiens de l’Islam: Les oulémas d’al-Azhar dans l’Egypte contemporaine (Presses de Science Po, 1996), traces the intertwining of al-Azhar and Egypt’s authoritarian government following the university’s nationalization in 1961. She writes that Egyptian leaders expected al-Azhar to enhance the state’s Islamic legitimacy, preserve the integrity of Islamic texts, and help align these sacred texts with state policy. In return, the government supported al-Azhar’s authority to interpret texts embodying Islam’s religious heritage. She argues that this alliance put the religious institution’s officials at odds with Islamists and like-minded members of al-Azhar. Islamic values and norms could no longer be controlled by the government or by al-Azhar as a state institution, she writes.

In her second book, Les Islamistes marocains: Le défi à la monarchie (La Découverte, 2005), Zeghal examined the interactions of the Moroccan monarchy with Islam. This volume -- since translated into English by George Holoch as Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics (Markus Wiener, 2008) -- depicts the failure of the Moroccan monarchy to maintain its role as the arbiter and embodiment of Islam in Morocco. From the 1970s, when Moroccans began to contest the king’s Islamic authority, through the growing democratization of Morocco’s public sphere in the 1990s, Zeghal traces the monarch’s inclusion of an Islamist party in the electoral arena and his ultimate acceptance of the fact that the monarchy is but one of many religious actors in the country.

Zeghal is at work on a third book, tentatively titled Sacred Politics: Political Islam and the State in the Middle East, which will expand upon her earlier focus on Egypt and Morocco to include a comparison with Tunisia and Jordan, reflecting on the meaning of secularism and the origins of 20th century religious revivals in the Middle East.

Zeghal is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (rue d’Ulm, 1987-91) and earned a Ph.D. in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris in 1994. Following a one-year postdoctoral position at New York University’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, she was a research fellow at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique from 1995 to 2005.