Dr Mehdy Shaddel, FRAS

I was born in Rasht, Gilan, and grew up in nearby Fuman. After finishing high school, I enrolled in a bachelor’s programme in physics, but, despite my love of the subject, I dropped out before finishing. Subsequently, I studied history on my own, and became enamoured with the study of early Islam. I published stuff on various aspects of early Islamic history as an independent scholar before being admitted into a PhD programme at Leiden University in the Netherlands (but, please, don’t ask me about my time there!), and also did stints at the University of Trier in Germany and Aga Khan University, London. After defending my PhD dissertation (for whose title, Apocalypse, Empire, and Universal Mission at the End of Antiquity: World Religions at the Crossroads, I was scolded at least once), I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to come to Cambridge and a Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS)-funded chargé de recherches position at the University of Liège, which I will be taking up following the end of my Leverhulme tenure at Cambridge.

My primary area of expertise is Near Eastern history, with a particular focus on Islamic origins and the socio-economic, political, and religious history of the early Muslim empire. At its core, my work blends philology with theoretical and comparative insights to address broader interdisciplinary themes such as apocalypticism and eschatology and comparative empires and state formation, with early Islam usually as a case-study. My publications have appeared in such venues as Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Arabica, Der Islam, Journal of Semitic Studies, and Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. I am currently working on two monographs, tentatively entitled Fiscal Regime and Social Transformation in Early Islam: The Emergence of the Classical Islamic World, which will deal with the vicissitudes of taxation, government service and pay, and the social disquiet they generated in the first two Islamic centuries, and Manifest Destiny: Islam and the Rhetoric of Universal Empire, interrogating aspirations of global dominance and how they impinged upon the development of Islamic dogma in the first centuries of Islam. On the side, I am preparing a study, critical edition, and translation of the Kitāb al-wuzarāʾ wa-l-kuttāb of Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdūs al-Jahshiyārī, a tenth-century bureaucratic history of the early Muslim empire. I am, together with Ekaterina Trepnalova, Lajos Berkes, and Naïm Vanthieghem, also preparing a volume of editions and translations, with historical-philological commentary, of a number of administrative documents from the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, tentatively entitled Administrative Papyri and Ostraca from the First Two Islamic Centuries.