Seyed AmirHossein Asghari is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Middle East (CSME) and an Affiliate Researcher at the Center for Possible Minds at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University, where his research focused on Islamic intellectual history, Shiʿi theology, and the intersections of philosophy, mysticism (ʿirfān / Sufism), and law in the modern Muslim world.
His scholarship spans Islamic philosophy, Shiʿi legal and theological traditions, natural law and its Islamic equivalents (fiṭrah, ḥikmah, ʿaql), and comparative religious thought, with particular attention to how religious traditions conceptualize ethics, authority, and the human self. A central thread of his work explores how Islamic intellectual traditions engage questions of moral knowledge and interreligious understanding in contemporary global contexts.
Dr. Asghari is actively involved in interreligious legal and philosophical dialogue, including his contribution to CSME’s ongoing program “Shiʿi Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning in Dialogue.” His current research includes projects on Islamic natural law, Shiʿi–Jewish comparative legal reasoning, and interdisciplinary work on the question of mind, bringing Islamic philosophical and spiritual conceptions of cognition, selfhood, and moral discernment into conversation with contemporary debates in cognitive science and the humanities.
He has taught at Indiana University and Butler University, offering courses on Islam, the modern Middle East, and comparative religious traditions. His scholarly work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. His recent monograph, Sufism and Philosophy in the Contemporary Shia Seminary (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), examines debates over philosophy and mysticism within modern Shiʿi seminaries and can be found on the publisher’s website:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sufism-and-philosophy-in-the-contemporary-shia-seminary-9780755656622/
More information about his research, publications, and public scholarship is available at
https://wisdom-religion.com, where his full curriculum vitae is also accessible.