User:Jmahallati/Mohammad Jafar Mahallati

Mohammad Ja`far Mahallati

Mohammad Jafar Mahallati has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from McGill University. He has also studied economics, civil engineering and international relations. He served as Ambassador to the United Nations from 1987-1989, a period that coincided with the peak of the eight-year long Iran-Iraq War. Going beyond his official mandate, he successfully strove for and was instrumental in bringing peace between the two countries. Mahallati has given lectures and seminars related to various aspects of the Muslim world at the universities of Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and Georgetown since 1991. Starting the spring of 2007 till present, he has thought courses at Oberlin College on Islam, Religion and Politics in the Modern Middle East, Introduction to the Quran, The Making of an Ayatollah, Muslim Ethics, Forgiveness in Islamic and Christian Traditions and Introduction to MENA Studies.

He was the recipient of the Harvard fellowship for Persian studies in 2005-2006. He also served as senior scholar and affiliate with several think tanks, including the Middle East Institute (Washington DC), the Center for Strategic and International Affairs (Washington DC), Search for Common Ground (Washington DC), Annual University of Conference on World Affairs (since 2004), World Congress of Imams and Rabbis (Brussels) and The Brainstorming Working Group for “The United Nations Alliance of the Civilizations” (2005). Through his immersion in several classical and modern academic disciplines as well as his diplomatic experience, Mahallati is well-equipped to understand various aspects of modern life in the Muslim world as well as the underlying historical factors crucial to the social, institutional and intellectual development of the Islamic civilization. In his Ph.D. research, he has focused on ‘Theories and History of Islamic Ethics,’ where in his view, the origins of the four world civilizations namely, the Indian, the Greek, the Persian and the Islamic civilizations meet. Presently he is working on a book titled: Revolution, War, and Shi‘ite Jurists in Iran: The Transformation of Traditional Theories of Jihad. This book focuses on modern critical writings on traditional ethics of jihad by Shi‘ite jurists since the end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1989. It analyzes new trends of critical thinking among Iranian clerics in the post-revolutionary and post-war eras of Iran. This book would be the first of its kind on this topic. It is intended for scholars and students of Islamic studies, law, history, international relations and ethics. It will also be of interest to the general public and to policymakers in the Muslim and the non-Muslim worlds. Another field of Mahallati’s current research is “Ethics of Friendship in Muslim Cultures.” This research, new in its field, aims at a better understanding of the significance of friendship in Muslim cultures at the individual and social levels. The research also looks at cultural and traditional factors in Muslim life that could be utilized in the modern international relations. For Mahallati friendship is far more than a virtue. It is a distinct worldview. He has initiated a Friendship Day Festival at Oberlin College in 2010 that is planned to continue as an annual college-wide, and then nation-wide celebration. His goal is to make this festival international. Mahallati has published in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, and several papers and academic periodicals in the Middle East. Mahallati has interests in Islamic arts and literature specifically Sufi poetry.