Faisal Devji

Who is Faisal Devji?

Faisal Devji is a historian who specializes in studies of Islam, globalization, violence and ethics. His multidisciplinary work grounds empirical historical issues in philosophical questions. He has taught at The New School in New York City. Since 2009, Devji is Reader in Modern South Asian History, Oxford University. He also is a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge.

Now a Canadian citizen, Devji is Zanzibari, having been born in Dar es Salaam in 1964 to a family of Indian ethnicity. His undergraduate education was at the University of British Columbia, where he received double honors in history and anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago with his dissertation Muslim Nationalism: Founding Identity in Colonial India and was chosen to be a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has taught at Yale University and also served as Head of Graduate Studies at The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. He knows English, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Kutchi, Khojki, Swahili, Persian, Sindhi and Urdu.

In 2005, Cornell University Press published his Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, exploring the ethical content of jihad as opposed to its more widely-studied purported political content. The book draws a distinction between the majority of Islamic fundamentalist organizations concerned with the establishing of states and al-Qaeda with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action. His next book was The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, published by Columbia University Press in October 2008. Devji is also a regular contributor to the scholarly journal Public Culture and serves on its Editorial Committee.