A Franklin & Marshall College religious studies professor has taken a fellowship at a prestigious scholarly center where some of the 20th century’s intellectual titans have studied.

“There’s an excellent community of scholars from all around the world who are here,” F&M’s SherAli Tareen says. “It’s a privilege.”

Tareen was accepted earlier this year to the Institute for Advanced Study, a nearly century-old independent center near Princeton, N.J. Here, luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Cold War diplomat George Kennan once studied.

IAS was featured in the 2023 film, “Oppenheimer.” From 1947 to 1966, the maker of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was director of the Institute, a place where academics share and explore ideas while conducting their research.

"When I taught my second book, 'Perilous Intimacies,' last spring in a class called Hindus and Muslims, the students in the class were from all over the world," Tareen says. "It was a fabulous experience."

Tareen began his yearlong membership in IAS’s School of Historical Studies in September.

“I’ll be basically working on my third book, which is an individual biography of an influential 18th-century Muslim scholar in South Asia called Shah Waliyullah, who died in 1762,” he says.

The last F&M scholar accepted to IAS was Biko Koenig, associate professor of government and public policy, who was a member of the Institute’s School of Social Science in 2021-22. In 2017-18, Religious Studies Professor John Modern was a member of the School of Social Science.

Tareen’s last two books, both academically acclaimed, were “Defending Muhammad in Modernity” (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) and “Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire” (Columbia University Press, 2023).

He believes his nonfiction works and research helped him gain IAS membership. 

“I think all of that did help in terms of having an intellectual kind of productivity that is needed to succeed for this membership, especially for more senior scholars,” Tareen says.

We ask Tareen three questions about his work as an author and his IAS membership:

You had a student help you with your first book, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, yes? 

Yes, Kelseyleigh (Reber, née Hepler ’16). I thank her in my book as well. She was a summer Hackman scholar and read many chapters of that book and gave me feedback. That gave me a sense of how a smart undergraduate at that time would read this kind of specialist scholarly material. I think that experience really helped make the book more readable and more accessible. It was a research collaboration. The book has since become one of the most reviewed in Islamic studies of the last two decades. It’s won a couple of book awards.

What inspires your research and writing?

My teaching always informs my research, and in many ways. When I taught my second book, “Perilous Intimacies,” last spring in a class called Hindus and Muslims, the students in the class were from all over the world. It was a fabulous experience. They engaged with it in very interesting ways.

What has the experience at IAS been like for you?

It’s the opportunity to interact with scholars in the humanities and social sciences from very different disciplines and different universities around the world that makes it exciting. The School of Historical Studies is divided into different research areas. We have history of science, ancient history, and then you also have Islamic and Near Eastern Studies spearheaded by Professor Sabine Schmidtke, a leading authority in Islamic Studies. Within that we have weekly colloquia and sessions where you can present your work, and workshop your work with some of the major scholars in this field from around the world. That will give a great impetus to my current project and help expand my horizons in the broader field of Islamic studies and the humanities, and even the social sciences, because of the wonderful people that are here this year. It's a very idyllic, very therapeutic place as well. I describe it as an academic resort. The pressure that I feel these days is that even after all that they've given, if I'm not able to be productive, then that would be an embarrassment. That is the pressure that sort of drives my productivity these days. It really is something quite incredible. I am really privileged and blessed. 

‘Perilous Intimacies’ is Finalist for American Academy of Religion Book Award

F&M Religious Studies Professor SherAli Tareen’s book “Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire” has been selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion book award for Excellence in the Study of Religion. The AAR book awards recognize “new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion. The awards honor books of distinctive originality, intelligence, and creativity, and these titles affect decisively how religion is examined, understood, and interpreted.” In this groundbreaking book, Tareen explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Based on the close reading of an expansive and multifaceted archive of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources, this book illuminates the depth, complexity, and profound divisions of the Muslim intellectual traditions of South Asia.