Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour

Profile

Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour received his primary, secondary, and undergraduate education at Al-Azhar, Cairo, graduating as valedictorian of his class with a bachelor’s in Islamic Studies, 2011. He then completed his MA in Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, U.K, funded by the British Chevening Scholarship. He did his PhD at SOAS in Comparative Theology, examining questions of truth salvation between Catholic Christianity and Sunni Islam. His thesis was supervised by Prof. Muhammad Abdel Haleem and examined by Prof. Rowan Williams, which is now published as a book with Brill, entitled: A Comparative History of Catholic and Ash‘arī Theologies of Truth and Salvation.

In 2019, Gamal was offered a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship from the Centre of Islamic Studies at SOAS, dealing with how the Quran uses the term kufr (disbelief) and how this impacts the Islamic theology of interfaith marriages. His forthcoming monograph with Oxford University Press, which carries the title: From the Higher Objectives of Islamic Law to the Higher Objectives of Islamic Theology, opens the doors to a new field of inquiry in Islamic theology.

Overview

My project at the University of York is in analytic theology. More particularly, my research attempts reading the Quran as a work of philosophy and reason, as opposed to reading it as a piece of revelation. To this end, the project interrogates the long-standing reason-revelation dichotomy within Islamic theology. In doing so, it aims to show how the content, rhetoric and narrative natures of the Quranic language can enrich the philosophical discourse.

Projects

Gamal is a postdoctoral research associate for the Islamic analytic theology, as part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded research project in Comparative Analytic Theology, based in the Department of Philosophy, University of York.