Omid Safi


Omid Safi is an American Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He served as the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center from July 2014 to June 2019 and was a columnist for On Being. Dr. Safi specializes in Islamic mysticism, contemporary Islamic thought and medieval Islamic history. He has served on the board of the Pluralism project at Harvard University and is the co-chair of the steering committee for the Study of Islam and the Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion. Before joining Duke University, Dr. Safi was a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was on faculty at Colgate University as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion from 1999 - 2004.

Life and work

Omid Safi was born in Jacksonville, Florida and is of Iranian descent. He was raised in Iran and fled Tehran to the United States with his family in 1985.
Safi is a leader of the progressive Muslim movement, which he defines as encompassing
a number of themes: striving to realize a just and pluralistic society through a critical engagement with Islam, a relentless pursuit of social justice, an emphasis on gender equality as a foundation of human rights, and a vision of religious and ethnic pluralism.

After September 11, 2001 Safi was publicly critical of the intolerance and violence among Muslims that inspired the attacks, reminding Muslims that their role lay in "calling both Muslims and Americans to the highest good of which we are capable."
Safi's book Progressive Muslims contains a diverse collection of essays by and about progressive Muslims. He is one of a number of progressive scholars of Islam in the early 21st century whose work has described for Western readers the diverse range of Muslim thought in the last half of the 20th century. As such, he has been described by Kevin Eckstrom, editor-in-chief of the Religion News Service, as "on the front edge of a generation of scholars who, with one foot in both worlds, are trying to explain Islam and the West to each other."
Safi was one of the co-founders of the Progressive Muslim Union. He resigned from PMU in 2005, but he continues to support progressive interpretations of Islam outside of PMU.

Selected works

Books