Dr Mehdy Shaddel, FRAS, FRNS

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, as well as on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations and apocalypticism and messianism (whether of an Islamic or Judaeo-Christian brand). 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 my case-studies coming from the mediaeval Islamicate Near East. 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, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, and Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.

I am currently working on two monographs. The first, The Rise of the Umayyads: From the First to the Second Civil War, offers a fresh assessment of the challenges facing the Umayyads in the early days of their rule, and their state-building programme, as well as the ensuing civil war, its course, and its legacy. The second, tentatively entitled Fiscal Regime and Social Transformation in the Early Caliphate: The Emergence of the Classical Islamic World, deals with the vicissitudes of taxation, government service and pay, and the social disquiet they generated in the first two Islamic centuries. 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.

I also occasionally write for the media on current affairs and academic research.

Select Publications:

1. ‘Power, Memory, and the Sacred: Early Abbasid Monumental Inscriptions and Patronage of the Meccan Sanctuary’, in Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, 2026.

2. ‘Doctrina Iacobi and the Rise of Islam’, in Nadine Viermann and Johannes Wienand (eds), Reading the Late Antique Monarchy: Empire and Religion in the Post-Justinianic Era, c. 565–711 CE, 2026.

3. ‘Periodisation and the futūḥ: Making Sense of Muḥammad’s Leadership of the Conquests in non-Muslim Sources’, Arabica, 2022.

4. ‘Monetary Reform under the Sufyanids: The Papyrological Evidence’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2021.

5. ‘Studia onomastica coranica: al-raqīm, caput Nabataeae’, Journal of Semitic Studies, 2017.

6. ‘The Sufyānī in Early Islamic Kerygma: An Enquiry into His Origins and Early Development’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017.

7. ‘ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr and the Mahdī: Between Propaganda and Historical Memory in the Second Civil War’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2017.

8. ‘Qurʾānic ummī: Genealogy, Ethnicity, and the Foundation of a New Community’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 2016.

Opinion pieces for the media:

1. ‘Academics Should Know from Job Ads Whom They Will Be Working with’, Inside Higher Ed (February 2019).

2. ‘Donald Trump Thinks It’s His Fault that Iran’s Currency Is in Meltdown. He Shouldn’t Be so Arrogant’, The Independent (September 2018).

3. ‘This Is Why Iran Won’t Negotiate with Trump’, The National Interest (August 2018).

4. ‘How Rouhani’s Neoliberal Policies Provoked Unrest in Iran’, openDemocracy (February 2018).