Photo credit: © Maria O’Leary
Joel Blecher is Associate Professor of History at The George Washington University and the author of Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (University of California Press, 2018). His work, which is grounded in archives and field sites in Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, and India, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has also worked to expand public discourse on the Islamic world through his engagement with public radio, The Atlantic, and numerous podcasts.
He is the translator, along with Mairaj Syed, of the first English translation of the Islamic world’s preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics: Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s Merits of the Plague (Penguin Classics, 2023). He is also co-editor, with Stefanie Brinkmann, of the first volume of scholarly essays ever published on the key texts and critical themes of hadith commentary across diverse periods, regions, and sects: Hadith Commentary: Continuity and Change (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming May 2023).
He is now preparing his second monograph, Profit & Prophecy: Islam and the Spice Trade (under contract with the University of California Press). At its heart, the book explores the dynamic and competing visions of Islam that transformed the ethics of global maritime trade prior to the rise of modern capitalism.
contact: jblecher@gwu.edu
