Assistant Professor
Sara Abdel-Latif is an Assistant Professor of Qur'anic Exegesis and Medieval Islamic Mysticism at the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies in Montreal. She completed her PhD in the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 2020, focusing on Sufism, Gender, and Qur'anic Exegesis. She has contributed articles to Brill's Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam as well as The Routledge Handbook on Sufism. Sara is currently working on her first book, based on her dissertation titled "Gendering Asceticism in Medieval Sufism." This work explores changing practices of asceticism in fifth/eleventh-century Khurasan, analyzing the move away from extreme physical acts of self-denial and self-mortification in early medieval Sufism towards discourses of inner renunciation that promoted different forms of gender differentiation and segregation.
Sara's other research interests include: diverse interpretations of the Qur'an, medieval Islamicate cities, Sufi epistemology, Islamic hagiography, and intersectional gender-conscious approaches to Islamicate history.
