Tahera Qutbuddin is Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. Previously, she taught for twenty years at the University of Chicago, where she is now Professor Emerita of Arabic literature. Her scholarship focuses on intersections of the literary, the religious, and the political in classical Arabic poetry and prose. Her publications include books and articles on a wide range of topics in classical Arabic literature and Islamic studies—poetry, orations, epistles, aphorisms, narrative, poetics, and philology—as well as the orations and sayings of Imam ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, ethical hadith and sermons of the Prophet Muhammad, Fatimid and Tayyibi Bohra poetry, history, theology, and law, literary features and symbolic exegesis of the Qur’an, classical Arabic women’s literature, and the history, functions, and literary genres of Arabic in India.
In 2025, Professor Qutbuddin’s translation of the preeminent tenth-century compilation of the words of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib entitled Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī (Brill 2024, Open Access) was awarded the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding (Doha). Her other work include such titles as Arabic Oration: Art and Function (Brill 2019), which won the 2021 Shaykh Zayed Book Award (Abu Dhabi), and Light in the Heavens: Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (Arabic edition and facing English translation; NYU Press, 2016). Professor Qutbuddin is currently working on a monograph on ʿAlī’s life, teachings, and eloquence, supported by the Leverhulme Foundation (United Kingdom). Her earlier scholarship has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
