People

The IIS is made up of staff, researchers, and scholars who bring their unique expertise and collaborative spirit to projects that help elevate our understanding of Islam and Muslims.

Staff

Anver Emon

Anver Emon

Director, Institute of Islamic Studies
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Anver M. Emon is Professor of Law and History and Canada Research Chair of Islamic Law and History at the University of Toronto. His research integrates a careful attention to Islamic legal history and contemporary debates on law and governance. He is director of the IIS, where he helps research teams incubate large scale research projects that have the capacity to recalibrate both academic and public debates on Islam and Muslims.

Anver M. Emon’s research centers on the study of Islamic law and history.  His publications address both premodern histories of Islamic law, and how those histories are deployed in contemporary debates on governance and the rule of law at a time when the spectre of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are highly politicized tropes in public debate around the world.  A professor in both the Faculty of Law and Department of History, Emon’s teachings range from foundational courses in legal education (constitutional law and statutory interpretation), to historical methods courses that center the study of Islamic law and comparative law. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his scholarship, having been the 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in Law,  appointed to the College of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded its 2017 Kitty Newman Memorial Award in Philosophy, and named a Senior Fellow to Massey College.  

In addition to publishing numerous articles, Professor Emon is the author of The ‘Islamic’ Deployed: The Study of Islam in Four Registers (Middle East Law and Governance, 2019), Islamic Natural Law Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law(Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (Oxford University Press, 2012).  His most recent book, Jurisdictional Exceptionalisms (Cambridge University Press, 2021), (co-authored with Urfan Khaliq) interrogates the fields of private international law and Islamic law as they impose themselves on the bodies of children abducted by parents across state borders. 

Zaid Khan

Zaid Khan

Research Officer, Institute of Islamic Studies

Zaid Khan in a Research Officer at the Institute of Islamic Studies. He supports the Institute with its strategic planning, communication design, stakeholder engagement, and project management.

Zaid has a background in strategic communications in the advertising and design industry. Zaid’s particular interest is in using design-led approaches to help communicate research in new ways, such as digital interactions or experiential installations. He holds a Masters in Design in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation Program at OCAD University.

Aly Rattansi

Aly Rattansi

Archivist, Muslims in Canada Archives

Aly is an archivist/chief archivist of the Muslims in Canada Archives at the University of Toronto. Previously he worked in media design, web3 and in museums and libraries. His research interests lie at the intersection of communities development and GLAM, and the study of Islam in the Americas. He holds degrees in information, the study of religion, and material culture from the University of Toronto.

Zainab Yusofi

Zainab Yusofi

Administrative, Outreach, and Communications Officer

Zainab Yusofi, a graduate of the University of Toronto with a Master's degree in Labor Relations and Human Resources, brings her expertise to the role of Communications and Events Specialist at IIS. With a successful track record in nonprofit organizations and a background encompassing IT management, HR processes, project coordination, and event execution, Zainab drives impactful communication strategies. Her global journey spans continents and her fluency in multiple languages further enriches her ability to foster meaningful connections and bridge cultural gaps.

Research Fellows

Dilyara Agisheva

Dilyara Agisheva

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dilyara Agisheva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Toronto. She earned her undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science at UCLA and later pursued an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, specializing in Islamic law and modernity.

Dilyara continued her academic journey as a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University, focusing on Islamic law and Ottoman history. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Entangled Legal Formations: Crimea Under Russian Rule in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” sheds light on the intricate legal dynamics of the region. Dilyara’s primary research interests include the interactions between European colonial and Islamic legal traditions in the modern period, with a specific focus on Islam in the Russian Empire and Islamic legal transformations concerning legal belonging, inheritance, legal authority, and property rights.

Currently, as a Postdoctoral Fellow, she is working on a book project based on her dissertation research, using Russian, Crimean, and Ottoman sources to trace the transformation of Islamic legal practices in Crimea following its annexation by the Russian Empire. Dilyara aims to bring greater awareness to Crimean history, particularly within the context of ongoing regional conflicts. She is actively engaged in several publication projects, including articles and encyclopedia entries, derived from her research on Crimea and Muslim communities in the Russian Empire. With her writing and academic activities at the IIS, Dilyara seeks to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on the themes of Islamic law and imperialism.

Sara Hamed

Sara Hamed

Postdoctoral Fellow

Sara Hamed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies. Her research centers on the 20th-century Islamic reformer Muhammad Shahrour, exploring the transatlantic and often clandestine communities that have emerged around his contentious ideas in North America and Europe, both in-person and online.

Sara Hamed is a PhD Candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Religious Studies, both from McMaster University. She is a two-time recipient of graduate level awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, and recently held a post as a graduate fellow at the R. F. Harney Program for Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. 

She is also a highly rated course instructor and award-winning teaching assistant at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her doctoral research brings debates in the anthropology of Islam about ethics and tradition to bear on Canadian Muslim aspirations in civil society, an area that is nearly untouched in the study of Islam and Muslims in Canada. Specifically, her doctoral work explores conceptions of tarbiyah as organizational practice in a context of pluralism and cultural fragmentation and the perceived role of Islamic charitable NGOs in the ethical formation of Muslims in Canada.

Sharifa Patel

Sharifa Patel

Postdoctoral Fellow

Sharifa Patel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies’ Structural Islamophobia Research Lab at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies and an MA in Gender Studies and Feminist Research from McMaster University, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto. 

Sharifa’s research examines Islamophobia within Canadian policies and how these policies specifically affect Muslim families. Her dissertation research analyzed framings of the Muslim family as a space of patriarchal violence in Canadian news media and political discourses (such as House of Commons debates). In her capacity as the W. P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University, she examined Canada’s intercountry adoption policy which restricts intercountry adoptions from countries that use the Islamic practice of kafala, arguing that the policy is inherently Islamophobic.

Her current postdoctoral project examines the understudied area of Muslim children’s and Muslim families’ relationships with Canada’s child welfare systems and focuses specifically on Muslim children in care in Ontario. Using qualitative methods, this research centers the experiences of Muslim families and Muslim children with Ontario’s child welfare system. This analysis addresses the necessity of tracking and maintaining data on Muslim children in care. As a result, the aim of this research is to also use quantitative methods to develop an archive of disaggregated data to better assess the prevalence of Islamophobia within Ontario’s child welfare system.

Sharifa is also the co-managing editor of the online, open-access journal, Feral Feminisms as well as an external associate for the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University. 

Moska Rokay

Moska Rokay

Research Associate, Muslims in Canada Archives

Moska Rokay has been a dedicated community organizer in her Afghan-Canadian community for over 9 years, committed to raising awareness for Afghanistan and uniting the diaspora in Canada. She is the founding archivist for the Muslims in Canada Archives at the IIS (2019-2022) and still continues to be a part of MiCA's development in a strategy and research capacity while also pursing doctoral studies. Moska received her Master of Information in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto in 2019 and advocates for archives/archival practice that centers marginalized communities. 

Moska is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information. Her research focuses on community archives, memories, figurations, and identity formation/representation of refugee and diaspora communities of war and trauma in Canada. Her research interrogates archival studies and explores community archiving for refugee and diaspora communities. Her academic interests lie in the interdisciplinary crossroads of archives, critical refugee studies, critical race and ethnicity studies, global Cold War studies, and memory studies. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Association of Canadian Archivists’ New Professional Award as well as the Archivaria Gordon Dodds Student Paper Prize.

She is an External Advisory Committee Member of Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Heritage Communities Program and has guest lectured for a number of university courses, including at the UofT Faculty of Information.

Sarah Shah

Sarah Shah

Data Team, Muslims in Canada Data Initiative
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Sarah Shah's research focuses on the sociology of Islam in Canada. A mixed methodologist, Shah's work highlights the intersections of gender and family relations, immigration and racialization, and mental health among Canadian Muslims.

Sarah Shah (they/them) received a doctoral degree in 2019 from The University of Toronto in Sociology. Shah’s research includes analyses of religion as it pertains to gender attitudes, family organization, mental health outcomes, and group identity. By interrogating the nuances of religiosity, including identities, practices, and approaches, Shah’s research unpacks how religion dialectically structures and is structured by gender and family relations, immigration and racialization processes, and mental health.

At the IIS, Shah is working with a team of leading researchers on the Muslims in Canada Data Initiative. This Initiative aims to address the dire lack of data on Canadian Muslims and their sociodemographic characteristics, socioeconomic outcomes, and social experiences in everyday life. Along with a robust panel of international scholars, the Initiative is supported by collaborations and partnerships with several Canadian Muslim community organizations.

Shah is cross appointed as a faculty member at the Department of Sociology, The University of Toronto Mississauga.

Graduate Fellows

Mitra Fakhrashrafi

Mitra Fakhrashrafi

Senior Fellow, Muslims in Canada Archives
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Mitra Fakhrashrafi (she/her) is a curator and emerging archivist interested in creating places of sanctuary and indebted to border abolition organizing. In 2020, Mitra published a Master’s thesis on shisha ban’s, surveillance and Muslim placemaking in the Greater Toronto Area.

Support Team

Fatima Sajan

Fatima Sajan

Advisor, Community Relations & Fundraising

Fatima Sajan is a Senior Development Officer, Major Gifts at the University of Toronto.

Institute Affiliates

Fahad Ahmad

Fahad Ahmad

Advisor, Structural Islamophobia Research Lab
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Fahad Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in national security governance, racialized policing and surveillance, civil society organizations, and the political economy of philanthropy.

Prior to joining Toronto Metropolitan University in July 2022, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. He obtained his PhD at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. His doctoral research, supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, comparatively examined the securitization of Muslim civil society organizations under national security regimes in Canada and the U.K. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation.

Fahad is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in critical terrorism/radicalization studies; racialized practices of national security policing and surveillance; civil society and resistance; and justice and community-oriented approaches to the study of philanthropy. His scholarship is informed by 15 years of work experience in community and nonprofit organizations in Canada and the U.S. His ongoing projects include work on the SSHRC Connection Grant, “Critical Reflections on Security, 9/11 and the Canadian Settler Colony,” and the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, “Justice Philanthropy: An international Research-to-Practice Network.” He is also the co-lead for the critical national security hub housed at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto.

Ulrike Al-Khamis

Ulrike Al-Khamis

Co-Chair, Islamic Art & Material Culture Collaborative
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Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis is the Director and CEO at the Aga Khan Museum. She has over 20 years of experience as a curator and senior advisor for museum and cultural projects, working with institutions including the National Museums of Scotland and Glasgow.

More recently Ulrike served as Co-Director at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization as well as Senior Strategic Advisor to the Sharjah Museums Department in the United Arab Emirates.

Michael Chagnon

Michael Chagnon

Co-Chair, Islamic Art & Material Culture Collaborative

Michael Chagnon (Ph.D.) is a curator at the Aga Khan Museum and Assistant Professor (status only) at the University of Toronto.

Ruba Kana’an

Ruba Kana’an

Co-Chair, Islamic Art & Material Culture Collaborative
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A noted historian of Islamic art, Dr. Ruba Kana’an is an assistant professor of Islamic art and architecture at the University of Toronto Mississauga and was the 2018-2019 Barakat Senior Fellow in Islamic Art, University of Oxford.

Dr. Kana’an’s primary research focuses on the Intersections between art, artists, art production and law in historical and contemporary contexts. She uses archival, textual and field-based research in her work, and has conducted research in Jordan, Palestine, Turkey, Yemen, Oman, East Africa, Egypt and Syria. In theoretical terms, her research engages with Bruno Latour’s object-networks and Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, among other frameworks. Her publications address questions about the formation and meanings of mosque architecture, metalwork and civic space in pre-modern Muslim societies.

Abdie Kazemipur

Abdie Kazemipur

Data Team, Muslims in Canada Data Initiative
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Dr. Abdie Kazemipur is Professor of Sociology and the Chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Calgary.

He previously served as Stephen Jarislowsly Chair in Culture Change and Immigration at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and has been the founding director of two research data centres at the University of Lethbridge and Memorial University. His research is in two distinct areas: the socio-economic experiences of immigrants in Canada, and the socio-cultural developments in the Middle East, on which he has published eight books. His book, The Muslim Question in Canada: A Story of Segmented Integration (UBC Press, 2014), received the 2015 John Porter Excellence Award from Canadian Sociological Association. He is currently working on a new book, titled Sacred as Secular: Secularization under Theocracy in Iran. Commentaries and interviews about his works have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, la Presse, Winnipeg Free Press, Vancouver Sun, Lethbridge Herald, Global TV, TVO, and Russia Today TV, among others.

Anna Korteweg

Anna Korteweg

Co-Principal Investigator, Atlantic Study of Islams and Muslims
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Anna Korteweg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her research focuses on the ways in which the perceived problems of immigrant integration are constructed in the intersections of gender, religion, ethnicity and national origin. From this critical vantage point, she has published extensively on debates surrounding the wearing of the headscarf, so-called “honour-based” violence, and Sharia law.

Professor Kortewe’s current projects look at the return of women who joined IS to their European home countries, the construction of LGBTQ+/gender rights in refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. She has published the two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford University Press 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul); Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, University of Toronto Press 2012). In addition, she has published articles in a wide range of journals, including Annual Review of SociologyTheory and SocietyEthnic and Racial StudiesSocial PoliticsGender and SocietySocial Identities, Nations and Nationalism, Women’s Studies International Forum, Canadian Criminal Law Review, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Law & Social Policy, International Journal of Feminist Politics, Signs, Social Compass, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Her research has been funded by multiple SSHRC grants and funding from the DAAD and CERIS.

Heba Mostafa

Heba Mostafa

Co-Chair, Islamic Art & Material Culture Collaborative
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Heba Mostafa is Assistant Professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. She received her doctorate from Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture in 2012 and holds degrees in architecture and the history of Islamic architecture from Cairo University and the American University in Cairo.

Dr. Mostafa has held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Kansas and the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence. Her research explores the formation of Islamic architecture through the lens of early Islamic sectarianism and governance and the intersections of politics, the sacred and architecture. A focus of her research is the interface of Islam with late antiquity, Christianity and Judaism through commemorative architecture, pilgrimage and ritual practice. Her two most recent projects explore Davidic commemoration in Jerusalem throughout the Islamic Medieval period and the spatial repertoires of Nile veneration in Medieval Cairo.

Michael Nesbitt

Michael Nesbitt

Advisor, Structural Islamophobia Research Lab
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Michael is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Calgary, where he teaches and researches in the areas of criminal law, national security law, and international organizations and human rights.

Michael engages regularly with the media on his areas of research, including writing comments for the Globe & Mail and the National Post, providing TV and radio interviews for the CBC, CTV, and other local, national and international broadcasters, and interviews with local and national newspapers and legal publications. Before joining the Faculty of Law in July 2015 he practiced law and worked on Middle East policy, human rights, international sanctions and terrorism for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs. Previously, he completed his articles and worked for Canada’s Department of Justice, where his focus was criminal law. Michael has also worked internationally for the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Appeals Chamber.

While completing his doctorate Michael was a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Scholar, executive editorial assistant to the University of Toronto Law Journal, and taught in the legal research and writing program.

Fahmida Suleman

Fahmida Suleman

Co-Chair, Islamic Art & Material Culture Collaborative
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Dr. Fahmida Suleman, ROM Curator of Islamic Art & Culture, is responsible for developing and implementing strategy to build, manage and interpret the ROM’s world-class collection of Islamic art and material culture, which represents the largest collection of its kind in Canada.

Fahmida’s role includes leading strategic acquisitions, developing public programs and exhibitions, and further engaging the Islamic community in Toronto and across Canada. Fahmida joined the ROM from the British Museum where she was Phyllis Bishop Curator for the Modern Middle East. In that position, Fahmida was responsible for the Museum’s collection of ethnographic objects and textiles from the Middle East and Central Asia. Previously, Fahmida has also been a consultant with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture during the development phase of the Aga Khan Museum.