Mona Hassan, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Mona Hassan is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies & History at Duke University in the departments of History and Religious Studies.  She obtained her Ph.D. from Princeton University and specializes in global Islamic history.  Dr. Hassan’s research and publications analyze the intersections of religion, culture, gender, and politics.  Her first book Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton University Press, 2017) received the American Academy of Religion's 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies.  It examines Muslim engagement with the notion of an Islamic caliphate following its loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries and explores how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have percolated through Muslim culture, law, and politics across Afro-Eurasia.  She has also researched and published on the shifting contours of women’s Islamic legal scholarship from the emergence of the Muslim community in the seventh century to the secular interventions of modern nation-states in the present. Some of her articles in this vein reinterpret how the history of Turkish secularism continues to affect the spatial mapping and contestation of gendered religious domains in the modern Republic of Turkey.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	118 Gray Building, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:

Teaching (Spring 2025):  (typical courses)

• RELIGION 772S.01, CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS Synopsis

  Gray 210, M 03:05 PM-05:35 PM

  (also cross-listed as HISTORY 772S.01)

• RELIGION 207S.01, SECULARISM Synopsis

  Gray 319, MW 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as HISTORY 213S.01, ICS 201S.01)

• RELIGION 776S.01, COMPARATIVE SECULARISM Synopsis

  TBA, M 12:00 PM-02:30 PM

  (also cross-listed as HISTORY 776S.01)

Education:

Ph.D.

Princeton University

2009

Specialties:

African, Middle East and Asia
Cultural History
Gender
Global and Comparative
Global Transnational History
Comparative Colonial Studies
Medieval and Early Modern History
Politics, Public Life and Governance

Research Interests:

Mona Hassan is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and History, and her research explores the intersections of religion, culture, politics, and gender. She investigates the shifting socio-political and cultural contexts in which Muslim female scholarship has been formed and articulated. Some of her recent articles in this vein reinterpret how the history of Turkish secularism continues to affect the spatial mapping and contestation of gendered religious domains in the modern Republic of Turkey. Her first book, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: Religious Imaginaries of State and Community among Premodern and Modern Muslims, examines Muslim engagement and entanglement with the notion of an Islamic caliphate following two poignant moments of symbolic loss, the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258 and the Turkish nationalist abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. It examines what Muslims across Afro-Eurasia imagined to be lost with the disappearance of the Abbasid and Ottoman caliphates and how they attempted to recapture that perceived loss, and in doing so redefined the caliphate for their times, under shifting circumstances. Vivid collective memories of the caliphate created a shared sense of community among disparate peoples at the same time as they gave rise to differing and competing visions of the community’s past, present, and future.

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Hassan, M, Poetic Memories of the Prophet’s Family: Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s Panegyrics for the ʿAbbasid Sultan-Caliph of Cairo al-Mustaʿīn, Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 29 no. 1 (January, 2018), pp. 1-24, Oxford University Press (OUP) [doi]  [abs]
2. Hassan, M, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (2017), pp. 408 pages, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691166780 [html]  [abs]
3. Hassan, M, Relations, Narrations, and Judgments: The Scholarly Networks and Contributions of an Early Female Muslim Jurist, Islamic Law and Society, vol. 22 no. 4 (2015), pp. 323-351, ISSN 1568-5195 [15685195-00224p01]  [abs]
4. Hassan, M, Reshaping Religious Authority in Contemporary Turkey: State-Sponsored Female Preacher, in Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, edited by Bano, M; Kalmbach, H (2012), pp. 85-103, Brill [women-leadership-and-mosques]  [abs]
5. Hassan, M, Women at the Intersection of Turkish Politics, Religion, and Education: The Unexpected Path to Becoming a State-Sponsored Female Preacher, Comparative Islamic Studies, vol. 5 no. 1 (2011), pp. 111-130, ISSN 1740-7125 (print) & 1747-9681 (online) [7978]  [abs]