Malika Zeghal
Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion and Islamic Studies in the Divinity School
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
Ph.D. (Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris)
Malika Zeghal is a political scientist who studies religion through the lens of Islam and power. She is particularly interested in Islamist movements and in the institutionalization of Islam in the Muslim world, with special focus on the Middle East and North Africa in the postcolonial period and on Muslim diasporas in North America and Western Europe. She has more general interests in the circulation and role of religious ideologies in situations of conflict and/or dialogue. She has published a study of central religious institutions in Egypt (Gardiens de l'Islam. Les oulémas d'al-Azhar dans l'Egypte contemporaine [Presses de Sciences Po, 1996]), and a volume on Islam and politics in Morocco (Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics [Markus Wiener, 2008]), which has won the French Voices-Pen American Center Award. She has recently edited a special issue of the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Intellectuels de l'islam contemporain. Nouvelles générations, nouveaux débats [123, 2008], on new intellectual debates in contemporary Islam. She is currently working on a book on states, secularity, and Islam in the contemporary Arab world, forthcoming at Princeton University Press. She will be on leave on a Carnegie Scholars Grant in 2009/2010.
