Biography

University of Washington - Religion

Assistant Professor at University of Washington
Higher Education
Hamza M.
Zafer
Seattle, Washington
www.hamzazafer.com

Currently, I am pursuing an interdisciplinary research program, unified by an interest in the emergence and expression of religio-communal ideologies among monotheistic groups in the late ancient Near East. My doctoral program of study has focused on three evidentiary domains: (1) the Qurʾān and early Muslim exegesis, (2) the early Arabic historiographical corpus and (3) late Midrashic Literature and the Targumim. My dissertation, titled “The Qurʾān's Communal Ideology: Rhetoric and Representation in Scripture and Early Historiography” is a detailed exploration of the Qurʾān’s religio-communal ideology in its late antique context and its mediation in early Muslim sources.

My study of the Qurʾān is grounded in both linguistic and literary approaches, adapted to account for the text’s particularities. The crucial underlying assumption of my analysis is that the Qurʾān constitutes a closed text—one with a distinct pre-classical context, a unique literary logic, and an evolving, albeit coherent, internal ideology. My synchronic investigation of Qurʾānic data, without recourse to its early Muslim mediations, attempts to elucidate how the Qurʾān’s polemical program is contingent on various late ancient Near Eastern discourses on communal election and soteriological legitimacy.

A secondary part of my current work addresses diachronic questions about the development of communal consciousness among the earliest Muslims. I am interested in exploring: how the Qurʾan’s communal addressees and interlocutors are historicized in the early Muslim corpus, how this historicization produces and polices particular communal boundaries, and how these boundaries are negotiated by liminal subjects and heterodox voices