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About
Sherman A. Jackson (b. 1956 CE), also known as Abdul Hakim Jackson, is among the foremost American scholars of Islam. He holds the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and serves as Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, having previously taught at the University of Michigan, where he was the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, as well as at the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, and Wayne State. He earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and, from 1987 to 1989, directed the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo.
Jackson is trained in classical Islamic law, theology, and intellectual history, and his work characteristically reads that heritage onto contemporary questions of race, liberalism, democracy, pluralism, and Muslim life in the West. His books include Islamic Law and the State (1996), On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam (2002), a study of al-Ghazali's Faysal al-Tafriqa; Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (2005); Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (2009); Sufism for Non-Sufis?, a translation and study of Ibn ʿAtaʾ Allah al-Sakandari's Taj al-ʿArus (2012); and The Islamic Secular (2024). He has been named among the world's 500 most influential Muslims.
Jackson is trained in classical Islamic law, theology, and intellectual history, and his work characteristically reads that heritage onto contemporary questions of race, liberalism, democracy, pluralism, and Muslim life in the West. His books include Islamic Law and the State (1996), On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam (2002), a study of al-Ghazali's Faysal al-Tafriqa; Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (2005); Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (2009); Sufism for Non-Sufis?, a translation and study of Ibn ʿAtaʾ Allah al-Sakandari's Taj al-ʿArus (2012); and The Islamic Secular (2024). He has been named among the world's 500 most influential Muslims.
