Scholars in Residence and Research Associates

Dr. Kamran Bashir

Scholar in Residence

Dr. Kamran Bashir is a historian of modern Islam, whose research focuses on the history of the interpretations of the Qur’an in South Asia and the allied question of how modern Muslim views of the life and person of the Prophet Muhammad evolved in the historical contexts of colonial and post-colonial India and Pakistan. He did his MA in Muslim Cultures from the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (London, United Kingdom) and earned his PhD in History in 2018 from the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada). Dr. Bashir published his book The Qur’an in South Asia with the Routledge Studies in the Qur’an Series (September 2021) and contributed a chapter to Religious Imaginations: How Narratives of Faith are Shaping Today’s World (ed. James Walters, Gingko Library, London, 2018). His research work has appeared in the Journal of Qur’anic Studies on Qur’anic hermeneutics, and Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture on the ethnohistory of marginalized communities in modern South Asia. He has taught courses in liberal arts at the University of Victoria, Camosun College, and Beaconhouse National University (Lahore, Pakistan).

Amira Elghawaby

Research Associate

Amira Elghawaby, journalist and human rights advocate, served as Canada’s first ever Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia between 2023 to 2026.

During her historic tenure, Ms. Elghawaby provided strategic advice to the Government of Canada on legislation, policies, and programs impacting Canadian Muslim communities. She also worked closely with federal departments to address issues related to online hate, anti-racism, discrimination and community safety.

Additionally, Ms. Elghawaby worked to raise public awareness on the challenges Islamophobia poses to Canada’s shared values, championing human rights, freedom of religion and inclusion on national and global platforms, including at the United Nations.

In spring 2025, her Office published The Canadian Guide to Understanding and Combatting Islamophobia, the first of its kind to be launched by a national government.

Prior to Ms. Elghawaby’s role, she was a contributing columnist at the Toronto Star and held roles in strategic communications and human rights at various national organizations, including at the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, at the National Council of Canadian Muslims, and in Canada’s labour movement.

Ms. Elghawaby is a founding board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and has served two terms as a Commissioner on the Public Policy Forum’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression.

In 2025, Ms. Elghawaby was awarded the King Charles Coronation Medal for her leadership.

Dr. Alnoor Gova

Scholar in Residence

My ancestors are from Kutch and Gujarat, India, and my community’s colonial entanglements led me to reckon with the structures that enabled my arrival onto unceded Coast Salish lands. These reflections guide my work bridging collaborative research, community media, and organizing, grounded in relational accountability and ethical reciprocity.

At the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, I explore how Indigenous nations and racialized communities—particularly those displaced by genocide—build relationships in the context of settler colonialism. I am grateful for the Centre’s support in enabling this research.  

Dr. Mohadeseh Jazaei

Scholar in Residence

Dr. Mohadeseh Jazaei is a political scientist whose research focuses on political thought, conceptual history, and the dynamics of political institutions and social change in the Middle East. Her work explores how political concepts such as parliament, democracy, identity, and justice evolve within historical and ideological struggles, with particular attention to contemporary Iranian politics and the broader Islamic world.

She received her PhD in Political Science (Political Thought) from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in 2020. Her doctoral research examined the historical transformation and institutional challenges of parliamentary politics in Iran, which was later developed into her book The Lost Opportunities of the Parliament in Iran.

Dr. Jazaei has held academic positions as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tehran in the Faculty of Governance and has lectured at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Her research and publications span several areas, including Islamic studies, political concepts and conceptual history, and gender studies. Her academic work focuses on the conceptual histories and tensions that emerge from encounters between colonial powers and colonized populations. Drawing on postcolonial theory and new historicism as theoretical and methodological frameworks, she examines how systems of power shape knowledge, language, and representation, and how colonial logics continue to structure contemporary political, cultural, and social relations long after the formal end of empire. From a postcolonial perspective, she studies how these terms function as discursive tools that organize hierarchies of belonging, legitimacy, and humanity. The framing of such concepts—whose voices are centered, whose histories are erased, and which cultural references are normalized—can either reproduce colonial power structures or create space for marginalized communities to articulate their own narratives.

Dr. Karim Karim

Scholar in Residence

Karim H. Karim is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University and Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. He has served as Director of Carleton’s Centre for the Study of Islam and its School of Journalism & Communication. Karim has also been a Co-Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He underwent schooling in Kenya and obtained university education at Columbia and McGill universities. Professor Karim has held visiting scholarly appointments at Simon Fraser University, Harvard University, and the Aga Khan University.

He has published numerous critically-acclaimed writings that have been cited globally. He won the inaugural Robinson Prize for his book, Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence (Black Rose). His other major publications include Re-Imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Western-Muslim Intersections (Palgrave Macmillan); Engaging the Other: Public Policy and Western-Muslim Intersections (Palgrave MacMillan); Diaspora and Media in Europe: Migration, Identity and Integration (Palgrave Macmillan); and The Media of Diaspora (Routledge). Among his most widely read articles is “Clash of Ignorance” (Global Media Journal). Karim has delivered keynote lectures in several countries. He has also organized several conferences.

He and his wife have established The Karim and Rosemin Karim Prize that recognizes research excellence in understudied areas of Ismaili Studies. The Government of Canada has granted him honours for advocacy for racialized people and for facilitating collaboration between religious communities. Dr. Karim has also received the inaugural Institute of Ismaili Studies Alumni Recognition Award for achievement and leadership.

Dr. Jennifer Lofkrantz

Scholar in Residence

Dr. Jennifer Lofkrantz is primarily a historian of precolonial Muslim West Africa and of contemporary northern Nigeria and the Sahel. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary jihad movements, comparative historical and contemporary slavery, historical and contemporary ransoming practices, Salafism, Salafi Jihadism, and Islamic law (Mālikī). She is the author of Ransoming Prisoners in Precolonial Muslim Western Africa (University of Rochester Press, 2023) which was a finalist for the 2024 Paul E Lovejoy Prize. Her research on slavery and ransoming has also been published in Slavery & Abolition, Journal of African History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and African Economic History among others.  Her research on Boko Haram has been published in Journal of West African History, International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Studies Review. She has taught at universities in Canada, the United States, Nigeria, and Kuwait.  She holds a Ph.D in African History from York University, a M.A in African History from Queen’s University and a BA (Hons) from Simon Fraser University.

Dr. Brandon Marriott

Research Associate

Dr. Brandon Marriott completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He has taught history as a sessional instructor at S.F.U. and held a variety of research positions around the world. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of London, a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, and a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo. His first book, Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, explores the ties between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the early-modern period. Academically, he is currently exploring representations of Gog and Magog in the Islamic world as part of a broader project on this apocalyptic motif across the Abrahamic faiths.

Dr. Nawal Musleh-Motut

Research Associate

Dr. Nawal Musleh-Motut is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication in the School of Culture, Media, and Society at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC. She is also a settler of Palestinian descent.

Before her move to UFV, she was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Justice and Decolonization with the Institute for the Study of Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines (ISTLD/TILT) and a Term Lecturer in the School of Communication, both at SFU.

Her book, Reconciling the Holocaust and the Nakba Through Photograph-based Storytelling: Willing the Impossible(2023 Palgrave Macmillan), explores how contending master narratives and collective memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which have created and continue to sustain the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, can be challenged, complicated, and disrupted when Palestinians and Israelis story and exchange their own counter-narratives and counter-memories of these tragedies through vernacular photographs.  Her other publications include, Comics Images and the Art of Witnessing: A Visual Analysis of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (ASJ 2019), From Palestine to the Canadian Diaspora: The Multiple Social Biographies of the Musleh Family’s Photographic Archive (MJCC 2015), and Negotiating Palestine Through the Familial Gaze: A Photographic (Post)memory Project (TOPIA 2012).

Nawal’s current research undertakes a decolonial investigation of the first ever livestreamed genocide and ethnic cleansing documented, narrated, and made visible by both the colonizer and the colonized. It first documents how Israelis and Palestinians have leveraged social media to further their causes – the former to justify the seizure of land and the dehumanization and erasure of native Palestinians, the latter to create an archive of their own suffering and resilience that calls for global witnesses and decolonial solidarity. It then explores the possibilities and limits of ever-increasing Palestinian/Indigenous solidarity and the creation of decolonial and just futurities via storytelling and visual culture.

Dr. Kamran Rabiei

Scholar in Residence

Kamran Rabiei is a sociologist and researcher specializing in comparative Middle Eastern studies, with a focus on social movements, revolutions, social change, and development. Through interdisciplinary studies, he seeks to analyze the social dynamics of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) societies in relation to political transformations. His current project, "Political Stability in the Middle East and North Africa: The Power of Coalition and Identity," aims to explain political stability and change in the region.

Through his research and teaching of courses such as Sociology of Islamic Societies, Social Movements, Sociology of Revolutions, and Cultural Anthropology, Rabiei has explored the interplay between social change, cultural foundations, and political transformations in the MENA region. His work examines how shifting social dynamics and cultural frameworks shape power structures and influence political developments. One of his key research interests is the evolving role and position of Islam in social conflicts and political transformations in the region in recent decades.

Rabiei has served as an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Tarbiat Modares University in Iran and has taught at several other institutions. He is the author of the book "Modernization and the Iranian World," in which he explores the formation of a dual rationality shaped by the dialectical relationship between tradition and modernity in Iran. Rabiei has also paid special attention to other countries, including Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. His research has been published in prestigious journals such as Sociology Compass, International Studies, Critical Research on Religion, and Contemporary Review of the Middle East.

Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo

Scholar in Residence

Amyn Sajoo’s specialization is in international human rights – notably at the nexus with citizenship, identity & religion. His teaching at SFU has spanned the departments of Political Science, International Studies and History. 

Dr. Sajoo’s early career was with the Canadian departments of Justice and Global Affairs, and he was the latter’s Visiting Academic in the Middle East in 2010. He served as the Canada-ASEAN Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, with fieldwork in Indonesia and Malaysia — followed by academic affiliations at Cambridge and McGill universities, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. 

He is the contributing editor of the Muslim Heritage Series in which the 6^th volume, Muslim Belonging in the West: The Ethics of Citizenship, is forthcoming.  The 5^th volume, The Shari'a: History, Ethics, and Law, was selected as a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. His earlier books, Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas, and the edited collections, A Companion to Muslim Cultures, and A Companion to Muslim Ethics, are open access from Bloomsbury UK. 

Dr. Sajoo has hosted a series of public conversations on “Identity and Citizenship” since 2018, sponsored by the Centre with SFU & civic partners. His onstage guests have included former supreme court chief justice Beverley McLachlin, John Ralston Saul, Anver Emon, Ulrike al-Khamis, Monia Mazigh, Saeed Teebi, Wenona Hall, and Canada’s special representative on Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby.