Shafaqna English- SICM Mahfil Ali had a conversation with Dr Ali Reza Bhojani as he talks about “Natural law & relativity: debates on the nature of morality in modern Shia legal theory“ on Friday 11 September 2026.
Speaker:
Ali Reza was appointed Assistant Professor in Islamic Ethics in 2024, after having initially joined the Department of Theology and Religion as Teaching Fellow in Islamic Ethics and Theology in 2021. He has held previous academic posts at the Al-Mahdi Institute, the University of Nottingham, the University of Oxford, and the Markfield Institute for Education. At the al-Mahdi Institute he served as a member of the executive team from 2012-2017 and as co-director for the Centre for Intra-Muslim Studies 2019-2021.
It was at the Al-Mahdi Institute that he began my Islamic Studies training, before moving to Durham’s Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies for a master’s and PhD funded by a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). His PhD thesis was published as Moral Rationalism and Sharia (Routledge, 2015). The intimate, yet often contested, relationship between sharia and ethics continue to be a central theme within his research.