Research Interests for Mona Hassan

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.

Recent 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]