Beyond Sharia
The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam

Dr. Arash Ghajarjazi

Post-doctorate Fellow

Personal Profile:

Dr. Arash Ghajarjazi is a post-doctorate fellow for the ERC Advanced Grant Beyond Sharia: The Role of Sufism in Shaping Islam. He received his PhD from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His research interests are Persian literature, literary theory, intellectual history, art history, and Religious Studies. His current research is dedicated to writing an intellectual history that explores the evolution of unbelief within Persian thought. He engages with classical Persian literature, literary biographies, apologetics, philosophical treatises, and Sufi compendiums. His research aims to uncover a nuanced and often overlooked tradition of critical thinking within Persian intellectual history. His research moves across a broad range of materials from the Medieval and Early Modern periods to Modern periods in Persian literature and culture.

Arash joined the team of the Beyond Sharia ERC project because he found its themes and questions timely and urgent. In his own contribution to the project, he is interested in examining how Islamic Sharia has been resisted, challenged, and transgressed in the Iranian intellectual context both in the past and the present, particularly through the lens of Khayyāmic quatrains. He will examine the relationship between medieval antinomian ideas and the rise of secularism in the Iranian world, i.e., Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, focusing on the poet Khayyam, his antinomian antecedents and the modern reception of his work.