This year’s scholars will all study themes focusing on Islam and the modern world.
New York University’s Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, and Noah Feldman, a professor in the School of Law, have been named Carnegie Scholars by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Each of the 16 scholars selected this year will receive up to $100,000 for a period of up to two years to pursue research advancing the strategic work of the Corporation. This year’s scholars will all study themes focusing on Islam and the modern world.
The goals of the Corporation’s new emphasis on Islam are to encourage the development and expansion of the study of Islam within the United States and to stimulate research on which to help build a body of thoughtful and original scholarship.
Haykel’s research explores Islamic law and political/social history. His Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cambridge University Press, 2003) is both an intellectual biography of Muhammad al-Shawkani (d. 1834) and a history of a vital transitional period in Yemeni history. As a Carnegie scholar, Haykel will study the history of the Salafi movement in Saudi Arabia (a.k.a. the Wahhabiyya) starting in the early 1960s, which is when the Saudi government established major Islamic institutions in the kingdom geared to disseminating Salafi teachings.
Noah Feldman, who served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, specializes in the relationship between religion and political authority. He served as senior advisor on constitutional law to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and as advisor to Iraqis involved in the constitutional process there. Feldman’s book, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building, was published by Princeton in November 2004. His first book, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (FSG) was published in 2003. His third book, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem (FSG) will be released in fall 2005. As a Carnegie scholar, Feldman will examine constitutional change in the Islamic world.
NYU Law Professors Richard H. Pildes (2004) and Stephen Holmes (2003) and Michael Gilsenan (2003), a professor in the departments of Anthropology and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, were previous Carnegie scholars. The first Carnegie scholars were selected in 2000.