Kamal Gasimov

Generally speaking, Kamal Gasimov is interested in Islamic legal theories, Islamic ethics, social movements, and state politics of religion, with a focus on both premodern and contemporary periods. Geographically, Kamal’s interests lie mostly in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Russia.

Kamal is currently examining the politics of bureaucratization of Islam in Azerbaijan (in a comparative perspective with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). He focuses on how bureaucratization transcends its organizational boundaries, superimposes its categories on the Muslim communities of the country, and transforms local religious discourses, practices, and landscapes. Kamal’s key interests lie in how and why the states that claim their legitimacy from the secular sources shift from regulation to a direct ideological intervention into the religious space creating a state-imagined “orthodoxy”.

His other project focuses on how Muslim mystics (Sufis) conceptualized Islamic law during the Middle Period of Islamic history (950-1600). It seeks to understand how and why Muslim mystics aspired to infuse the letter of Islamic law (Shari‘a) with higher spiritual meanings. It also examines the possibilities and limitations of this spiritual-mystical approach to mundane matters. The focus of the research aims to find out whether this approach comprises all creatures or just select ones.