, the Imam Sajjad Chair in Shi士i Studies and Senior Lecturer at the, is the fifth recipient of the 鸟大大影院 Zahid Ali Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded once every five years to a scholar working in the field of Classical Arabic Literature who will use the award to publish research on a topic of relevance to Ismaili Studies.
Research focus and academic background
Dr Rajani鈥檚 primary research focuses on the origins and development of 岣诲墨迟丑Lit. 鈥榬eport鈥 or 鈥榥arrative,鈥 used for the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and in Shi鈥榠 Islam also for those of the Imams. corpora, with broader interests spanning Qur示anic exegesis, Islamic law and legal theory, South Asian Studies, Ismaili Studies, and Shi士i Studies more generally. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2019鈥2022) on the -funded project Law, Authority and Learning in Shi士ite Islam. He has published in leading journals and has both edited and co-edited scholarly volumes. Dr Rajani also spent several years at a Shi士i seminary in QumA historic city in Iran to the south of Tehran. It is considered by many Shi鈥榠 Muslims as Iran鈥檚 second holiest city after Mashhad. Qum is a leading centre of…, where he studied and taught classical Islamic texts in 岣诲墨迟丑, fiqhThe science of Islamic jurisprudence., and Islamic legal theory.
Dr Rajani is the recipient of multiple prestigious fellowships, including a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the (2022), a (2023鈥2026), and a Templeton Fellowship (2025).
Fellowship project and scholarly contribution
The Zahid Ali Fellowship will enable Dr Rajani to expand a major strand of his current research on the origins, development, and transmission of the often underappreciated and underrepresented exoteric tradition of the FatimidsMajor Muslim dynasty of Ismaili caliphs in North Africa (from 909) and later in Egypt (973鈥1171) More. Building on the framework established in his doctoral research, this project addresses both general and specific problems in our understanding of Ismaili 岣诲墨迟丑 sources, thereby filling a significant gap in the study of Shi士i traditions more broadly. His research will re-examine prevailing hypotheses in the secondary literature concerning the collection, arrangement, and presentation of 岣诲墨迟丑 in Ismaili works. The project is envisaged to culminate in a monograph that will offer a methodological approach to reconstructing early Ismaili textual traditions, drawing on manuscript evidence from public and private libraries across multiple regions.
Dr Rajani says: 鈥淭he Zahid Ali Fellowship carries particular intellectual weight, not only for its prestige but for the scholarly legacy it invokes. Being associated with a figure who helped establish modern Ismaili studies as a rigorous academic field is both an honour and a responsibility. My project seeks to re-open early Ismaili sources that have long remained marginal to the study of Shi士i Islam, to develop methodological tools for reconstructing fragmentary and lost materials, and, in doing so, to rethink how Shi士i textual traditions are situated within Islamic intellectual history.鈥
