Real name:
Biography:
I earned a PhD in Near Eastern Studies (with a concentration in early Islamic literature) from UC Berkeley in 2007. In addition to my two languages of focus, Arabic and Persian, I read Spanish, French, Italian, German, Welsh, Russian, Latin, and Ancient Greek. I have published two peer-reviewed books, Jihad in Premodern Sufi Writings (Palgrave 2017) and Sufi Warrior Saints (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris 2022). My academic interests include jihad in Sufism, Sufi poetry, Persian wisdom literature, and early Sufism.