Najam Haider is a Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The Origins of the Shi‘a (2011) focusing on the role of ritual and sacred space in the formation of Shi‘i identity and Shi‘i Islam (2014) which examines three branches of Shi‘i Islam—Zaydi, Twelver, and Ismaili, through a framework of memory. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East, including Syria where he was a Fulbright scholar and Yemen where he studied with traditional Zaydi scholars. His most recent book, The Rebel and The Imam in Early Islam (2019), proposes a new model for Muslim historical writing that draws on Late Antique historiography to challenge the imposition of modern notions of history on a pre-modern society.
