Filling the Gap:

Islamic Scholar Joins Religious Studies Department

Until this fall, options were limited for CSU, Chico religious studies students who wanted to learn about Islam. There was no current Islam expert in the Department of Religious Studies (although Nasim Jawed teaches an introduction to Islam as a reltious and cultural system for the history department). The University had never offered a course in the Qur’an, the central religious text for a fifth of the world’s population; and Arabic was taught as a tutorial, but not as a regular course.

Enter Mahan Mirza, the Department of Religious Studies’ new Islam expert, as both an academic and a practicing Muslim.

“To understand Islam, to learn about it and Muslim people, the Muslim world, is something that is badly needed. To have a religious studies department that focuses on world religions from a historical perspective and have Islam unrepresented or missing is unthinkable—not just because of the way the world is today politically, but also because of the history of religions and the place of Islam in that history,” said Mirza. “Departments all over the country are hiring experts in Islam to fill a big gap in their curriculum.”

Mirza comes to the University from Yale, where he is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies. He grew up in Pakistan as the son of an air force pilot, spending some of his childhood in England and the suburbs of Los Angeles. His goal was to become a pilot like his father, but the need for glasses forced him to change his career plans. He decided to train to become an engineer and completed a degree in mechanical engineering at University of Texas, Austin.

“It wasn’t a passion,” Mirza admitted of engineering. “I worked for a couple years as an engineer. I knew from the start I was meant to do something else.” At the same time, he was becoming more interested in his Islamic heritage. He had been brought up Muslim, but in a very modern household that wasn’t focused on the traditional religious practices. Mirza reaffirmed his own faith, learned Arabic, immersed himself in the study of the Qur’an, and decided to pursue an MA in Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary.

Soon Mirza realized that he was more drawn to the academic study of Islam, and made the switch to Yale. There, he learned German, French, Arabic, and Persian in addition to his native Urdu and English. He spent a year in Germany, where, he said, “Islamic studies are more advanced.” His dissertation is a “close reading of the works of medieval Muslim scientist and polymath al-Biruni,” a figure whose scientific discoveries are comparable to Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo.

Mirza is also assistant editor of the Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought with Princeton University Press. His future research plans are in examining the use of the Qur’an to revitalize faith in the modern world.

Mirza will be doing that work as a member of our University and community. He moved to Chico with his wife and three young sons in June, choosing our community partly because it is so

bike friendly, reminding them of their time in Germany. This semester, he is teaching a class on Islam and another on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He will also teach a course on the Qur’an and possibly an Arabic language course in the future, and he plans to offer his assistance in strengthening the Middle Eastern Studies program.

But most of all, he hopes to communicate the enormous complexity of the Muslim world. “The vast majority of Muslims live outside the Arab world. Islam is already the second largest religion in Europe. The most common name for boys being born in Brussels is Muhammad. There are big shifts taking place.”

These shifts are also happening in the United States, making Islamic studies increasingly important, said Mirza. “There are a lot of Muslims in America, and not all of them are immigrants.

“Whenever you think of a ‘Muslim,’” he added, “you see a foreign face, someone living in the Middle East. But that does not reflect the demographic reality, and perpetuates this notion of the Muslim as ‘other.’ My hope is that, with education, more Americans will see the religion of Islam not just as Arab or foreign, but as a major world religion and as the religion of millions of their fellow citizens.”

—Anna Harris, Public Affairs and Publications