Sami Al-Daghistani

Sami Al-Daghistani is an Associate Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Lund University, Sweden, an Associate Faculty Member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR) in New York City, and a Research Scholar at the Middle East Institute (MEI) at Columbia University. His research is situated at the intersection of Islamic economics, environment, ethics, and law in Islamic intellectual history and in the contemporary period.

Prior to Lund University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo (2020-2024), a Research Fellow at the University of Oslo (2017-2018), and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University (2017-2018). He obtained his PhD in 2017 in Islamic Studies at Leiden University with a co-supervision at Columbia University under the mentorship of Wael B. Hallaq. During his PhD studies, he was a Visiting Scholar at MESAAS and IRCPL at Columbia University (2015-2017). Previously, he studied Arabic and Islamic Studies in Sarajevo (2010), Cairo (2011), Rabat (2013), Leiden (2011-2013), and at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University (2014).

He is the author of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Ethical Teachings: Economics of Happiness (Anthem Press, 2021), the award-wining The Making of Islamic Economic Thought: Islamization, Law, and Moral Discourses (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Islam in ljubezen (Beletrina: Ljubljana, 2023), as well as a co-editor of Pluralism in Emergenc(i)es in the Middle East and North Africa (Review of Middle East Studies, 2021), and the editor of Recovering Environmental and Economic Traditions in the Islamic World (Brill, 2024). He also translated Ibn Battuta’s Rihla (2017) and Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan (2016) to Slovenian. In 2021, he launched an interdisciplinary research group and consortium Critical Islamic Studies, whose aims are to engage with both historical and modern analysis of and research in the field of Islamic Studies, and to seek external funding opportunities and collaboration.

Sami frequents between New York and Scandinavia for family and academic engagements.