Uzair Ibrahim

Email:

 

I am currently a second-year PhD candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies. My research intersects engagement with the occult/esoteric/metaphysical, commemoration of the event of Karbala, and Shiʿi intellectual and ritual history from the so-called early modern to the modern period. I employ tools from anthropology, history, philosophy, and the critical study of religion to investigate the life of a jinni named Zaʿfar, who is the protagonist of my study.

I am a Farhad Daftary Doctoral Scholar at the University of Exeter. Before joining Exeter, I completed an MA with distinction in South Asian Studies at SOAS, University of London, where I wrote a dissertation on engagement with the ghayb and the world of the jinn in nineteenth-century Urdu mars̱īya and how that demands that we rethink and expand our conventionally held notions of time and history.

My MA at SOAS was funded by The Institute of Ismaili Studies, as part of their flagship, fully-funded Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities, which I completed in 2020. I arrived at the IIS from Habib University, Pakistan, whence I obtained a BSc (Honors) in Social Development and Policy in 2018.

I hail from an Ismaili Shiʿi background, and I tweet @uzairibrahim_