Professor Andrew Marsham

Andrew Marsham studied History at Oxford, where he became interested in the early history of Islam. He went on to postgraduate study at Oxford in Arabic and Islamic History, and Arabic study in Egypt and Syria, before teaching and researching in Sheffield, Cambridge, Manchester, and Edinburgh. His main research interests concern the formation of the first Islamic political structures and their wider late antique and medieval contexts. His first monograph, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy (Edinburgh, 2009), is the only full-length study of the pledges of allegiance given to the rulers of the early Islamic empire. He has also written on the execution of rebels, on history writing in Arabic, and on the comparative history of medieval political culture. He co-edited Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam (Oxford, 2018) with Professor Alain George and edited The Umayyad World (Routledge, 2021). His most recent book, The Umayyad Empire (Edinburgh, 2024), is a new study of the formation in Late Antiquity of the first Islamic empire, under the leadership of the Umayyad branch of the Prophet Muhammad's tribe.