Shaykh Jonathan A.C. Brown

Jonathan A.C. Brown (born 1977) is an American Islamic scholar who is currently Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University.

Jonathan A.C. Brown was born in 1977 to Jonathan C Brown and anthropologist Ellen Clifton Patterson. He was raised as an Anglican and converted to Islam in 1997. Brown graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History in 2000 from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., studied Arabic for a year at the prestigious Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University of Cairo, and completed his doctorate in Islamic thought at the University of Chicago in 2006.

From 2006 to 2010 he taught in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington in Seattle, and since 2010 has been Assistant Professor in Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Understanding in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He has written on Hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is currently focused on the history of forgery and historical criticism in Islamic civilization and modern conflicts between late Sunni Traditionalism and Salafism in Islamic Thought. His research has taken him to Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Indonesia, India andIran among others.

Books authored

• Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011)

• Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and modern World (Oneworld Publications, Foundations of Islam series, 2009).

• The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Leiden:Brill Publishers, 2007).

Articles

• "How We Know early Hadith Critics Did Matn Criticism and Why It's So Hard to Find". Islamic Law and Society (15): 143–84. 2008.

• “New Data on the Delateralization of Dad and its Merger with Za’ in Classical Arabic: Contributions from Old South Arabian and the Earliest Islamic Texts on D / Z Minimal Pairs,” Journal of Semitic Studies 52, no.2 (2007): 335-368.

• "The Last Days of al-Ghazzali and the Tripartite Division of Sufi World: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Letter to the Seljuq Vizier and Commentary." The Muslim World 96, no. 1 (2006): 89-113.

• "Criticism of the Proto-Hadith Canon: al-Daraqutni's Adjustment of al-Bukhari and Muslim's Sahihs." Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies 15/1 (2004): 1-37.

• Social Context of Pre-Islamic Poetry[dead link]: Poetic Imagery and Social Reality in the Mu'allaqat." Arab Studies Quarterly 25/3 (2003): 29-50.