Speakers
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad
Keynote Speaker
Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad is a Jordanian royal and a distinguished scholar of Islamic philosophy. He earned his BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1988, graduating summa cum laude. He then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, obtaining a PhD in Modern and Medieval Languages and Literatures in 1993, with a thesis titled "What is Falling in Love?: A Study of the Literary Archetype of Love." Furthering his academic pursuits, he received a second PhD in Islamic Philosophy from Al-Azhar University in 2010, awarded with highest honors.
Prince Ghazi serves as a professor of Islamic philosophy at the University of Jordan. He is also the Chief Advisor for Religious and Cultural Affairs and Personal Envoy to His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan. Additionally, he chairs the Board of Trustees of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought and serves as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the World Islamic Sciences and Education University (WISE) in Amman.
Prince Ghazi is renowned for initiating major interfaith efforts, including The Amman Message and A Common Word Between Us and You, and the UN-endorsed World Interfaith Harmony Week. His publications include the acclaimed A Thinking Person’s Guide series, which addresses themes such as Islam, love, and the environment with philosophical and theological depth. The series includes A Thinking Person’s Guide to Islam, A Thinking Person’s Guide to Love, and A Thinking Person’s Guide to Our Times, among others, and is known for its accessible yet intellectually rigorous approach. He is also the author of Love in the Holy Qurʾān, a comprehensive exploration of the concept of love in Islamic scripture, as well as numerous essays and works on Islamic ethics, interfaith dialogue, and contemporary challenges facing the Muslim world.
Amal Awad
Convener
Amal Awad is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Pembroke College. Her research focuses on the philosophy of mind in post-classical Arabic/Islamic thought, particularly between 1000–1300 CE. She completed her PhD at Cambridge on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s philosophy of mind, building on her background in Islamic philosophy and theology (University of Jordan, King’s College London). Before academia, Dr. Awad trained and worked as a dentist in Jordan. Her research explores how thinkers like Avicenna, Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī, and al-Rāzī reinterpreted the soul, causation, and consciousness, bridging philosophy and kalām.
John Marenbon
John Marenbon was born in 1955 and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow. He is now a Senior Research Fellow there, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His earlier work concentrated on Boethius, Abelard and twelfth-century Latin philosophy. More recently he has written Pagans and Philosophers. The problem of paganism from Augustine to Leibniz. His main current interests and work in progress include: early medieval Latin philosophy, cultural comparisons in the Middle Ages, philosophy outside the universities in later medieval Europe, the social history of logic, metaphysics in the long Middle Ages (facts and states of affairs, relations, matter, freedom and determinism), methods and aims of history of philosophy, conservative philosophy.
Tommaso Alpina
Tommaso Alpina (PhD Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa 2016) is a Tenure-track Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in the Islamic World at the University of Pavia and a Research Associate at the Farouk Jabre Center for Arabic and Islamic Science and Philosophy of the American University of Beirut. He is currently the recipient of a three-year Marie Curie Global Fellowship for the project AREB: The Arabic Roots of European Biology. Before joining the University of Pavia, he was a Research Associate (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at LMU Munich (2018-2023). He is the author of Subject, Definition, Activity: Framing Avicenna’s Science of the Soul (De Gruyter 2021) and many journal articles and book chapters on Avicenna’s psychology, biology, and
medicine.
Frank Griffel
Frank Griffel is Professor of the Study of Abrahamic Religions at Oxford University and Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. He has published widely in the fields of Islamic philosophy and theology as well as Muslim intellectual history. After working on apostasy in Islam and on the leading theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Griffel turned his interest toward the history of philosophy in Islam and Judaism, particularly during Islam’s post-classical period after the 11th century. He publishes in English and in German and his books have been translated into Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Griffel is also the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Yale University. His latest book is The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam, published with Oxford University Press 2021.
Peter Adamson
Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU in Munich. He is the author of Al-Kindī and Al-Razī in the series “Great Medieval Thinkers” from Oxford University Press, and has edited or co-edited numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays. He is also the host of the History of Philosophy podcast (www.historyofphilosophy.net), which appears as a series of books with Oxford University Press.
Ayman Shihadeh
Ayman Shihadeh (DPhil Oxford) is Professor of the Intellectual History of the Islamic World at SOAS University of London. He has published extensively on the history of philosophy and theology and the broader intellectual history of the premodern Islamic world.
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour
Mohammad Saleh Zarepour is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Medieval Finitism (CUP 2024) and Necessary Existence and Monotheism (CUP 2022) and the (co-)editor of several collections, including Logic, Soul, and World (Brill 2025) and Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP 2024). His interests include medieval Islamic philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, and topics in the intersection of philosophies of mind and language (e.g., intentionality and reference).
Jari Kaukua
Jari Kaukua is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä. He is the author of Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy (CUP, 2015) and Suhrawardī’s Illuminationism (Brill, 2022), as well as many articles on classical and post-classical Islamic philosophy.
M Necmeddin Besikci
M Necmeddin Besikci is a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Besikci's Ph.D. thesis examines the Ottoman polymath Ismail Gelenbevi (d. 1205/1791), with a particular focus on his ontological and epistemological debates, including the discussions on external vs mental existence, the theory of nafs al-amr, God’s knowledge and hypothetical quiddities. His broader research focuses on Islamic Philosophy, particularly in the post-Razian and Ottoman periods.
Fedor Benevich
Fedor Benevich is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD in 2016 at LMU Munich with a thesis on Avicenna's essentialism. Benevich is the co-author of two volumes of Heirs of Avicenna: Philosophy in the Islamic East, 12th–13th Centuries, and the author of multiple articles on Avicenna, post-classical Islamic philosophy, and the philosophy of kalām.
Dustin Klinger
Dustin Klinger Ph.D. (2021), Harvard University, is the author of Being Another Way: The Copula and Arabic Philosophy of Language, 900–1500 (University of California Press, 2024) and coauthor of The Heirs of Avicenna: Philosophy in the Islamic East, 12–13th Centuries. Logic and Epistemology (Brill, 2025). Currently he is a British Academy International Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
Hassan Rezakhany
Hassan Rezakhany is currently a Walter-Benjamin-Stelle postdoctoral researcher at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Islamic philosophy—whether epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics—is the mainstay of his research, and he maintains an active interest in several other subjects, both philosophical and literary. Before moving to Germany, he lived and worked in Finland for a few years. He was awarded the PhD by the University of California, Berkeley.
Francesco Omar Zamboni
Francesco Omar Zamboni obtained his PhD in Philosophy in 2021 from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). His doctoral dissertation focused on Avicenna’s ontology (theory of existence) and aetiology (theory of causation), as well as on their reception in XI, XII, and XIII c. Islamic philosophy.In 2021, as research fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici (Naples), he investigated the Islamic theories of resurrection in relation to ontology (the recreation of the non-existent) and philosophical anthropology (materialist theories of personhood and identity).In 2022 and 2023, he worked as post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). His research focused on general metaphysics in the post-Avicennian period, and more specifically on the theory of transcendental properties developed by Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.He is currently Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen. His research focuses on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi’s epistemology of metaphysics. He aims to develop an axiomatics (theory of principles) of Razi’s metaphysics.
Shoaib Ahmed Malik
Shoaib Ahmed Malik is Lecturer in Science and Religion at the University of Edinburgh. With a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Nottingham and another in Theology from the University of St Mary’s, Twickenham, Shoaib stands at the crossroads of Science and Religion. His monograph work, Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm, was acclaimed as the foremost academic contribution to the field of science and religion, receiving recognition from the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) in 2022. He holds the position of Trustee at the ISSR and serves on the editorial board of Theology and Science. Shoaib also assumes the role of Chief Editor for Palgrave’s newly launched Islam and Science book series and encyclopedia, further enriching scholarly discourse at this interdisciplinary crossroads.
Suf Amichay
Suf Amichay is a Junior Research Fellow in the History of Science at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Her research focuses on medieval philosophy, with a particular emphasis on natural philosophy and metaphysics. She works across Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions, especially on Avicenna and the reception of Aristotelian thought. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and a background in philosophy and the history of science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Tony Street
Tony Street is Assistant Director of Research in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. He works on Arabic logic and Islamic intellectual history of the thirteenth century.
Chairman