Malika Zeghal is Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Paris (France). As a political scientist, she studies religion through the lens of Islam and power. She is particularly interested in the institutionalization of Islam in the Muslim world, with special interests in Egypt and North Africa in the postcolonial period and in Muslim diasporas in North America and Western Europe. She has more general interests in the circulation and role of religious ideologies in situations of conflict and/or dialogue. She has published a study of central religious institutions in Egypt (Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al-Azhar dans l'Egypte contemporaine [Presses de Sciences Po, 1996]), and a volume on Morocco (Les islamistes marocains: le défi à la monarchie [La Découverte, 2005], revised and translated (Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics [Markus Wiener, 2008]), which has won the French Voices-Pen American Center Award. She has edited with Marc Gaborieau a special issue of the French review Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions, Autorités religieuses en Islam [125, 2004], on religious authorities in Islam, as well as a special issue of the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Intellectuels de l’islam contemporain. Nouvelles générations, nouveaux débats [123, 2008], on new intellectual debates in contemporary Islam. She is now working on a book on states, secularism, and Islam in the contemporary Arab world, forthcoming at Princeton University Press.

 25 June 2008