Vincent J. CornellAsa Griggs Candler Professor

Vincent J. Cornell ( Ph.D. UCLA, 1989) is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies (2006-present). From 2000-2006, he was Director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. From 1991-2000, he taught at Duke University. He has published over 40 articles and five books: The Way of Abū Madyan (1996); Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (1998); the five-volume set Voices of Islam (2007); Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims Worship the Same God? (co-authored, 2012), and the collection The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality (2023). Since 2016 he has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies. His dissertation won the 1990 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities from the Middle East Studies Association. His teaching interests include Sufism, Islamic Theology and Philosophy, and historiography. His current work is Waystations of Being: Theological Writings of Ibn Sab‘īn (ca. 1215-1271 CE). For ten years he was a key participant in the Building Bridges seminars organized by Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams. He has also participated in projects organized by the Shalom Hartman Institute and the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Israel.

Education/Degrees

• Ph.D, Islamic Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
• B.A., Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Teaching/Research Areas

• Islamic Theology and Philosophy
• Islamic Mysticism
• Islamic Spain and North Africa
• Islamic Law and Moral Philosophy
• The Study of Sainthood
• Historiography and Civilization Studies
• Islamic Esotericism 

Books Published

• The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality, with Bruce B. Lawrence (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2023)
• Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims Worship the Same God? with Baruch Levine, Jacob Neusner, and Bruce Chilton (Abingdon Press, 2012)
• Voices of Islam, 5 volumes (Praeger, 2007)
• Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (University of Texas Press, 1998)
• The Way of Abū Madyan: Doctrinal and Poetic Works of Abū Madyan Shu‘ayb ibn al-Ḥusayn al-Anṣārī (ca. 509/1115-16—594/1198 (The Islamic Texts Society, 1996).
• The Book of the Glory of the Black Race: al-Jahiz’s Kitab Fakhr as-Sudan ‘ala al-Bidan (The Phyllis Preston Collection, 1981)