Asma Sayeed
Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA
Asma Sayeed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at UCLA in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her primary research interests are in early and classical Muslim social history, the intersections of law and social history, gender, and the history of Muslim education. Her book, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press) analyses Muslim women’s religious education, specifically their transmission of ḥadīth from the rise of Islam to the early Ottoman period. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She was previously Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College (Easton, PA), where she taught courses in Islam and World Religions. She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam. She recently undertook archival research in Syria on Muslim women’s education in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods under the auspices of a Fulbright fellowship.
