Faculty

Farid Esack

Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies

Farid Esack was William Henry Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School for the 2006-07 academic year, and is now the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies. He is a South African Muslim theologian who completed the Darsi Nizami, the traditional Islamic Studies program, in madrassahs in Karachi, Pakistan. He completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham, England, and did postdoctoral work on biblical hermeneutics at the Philosophisch Theologische Hochschule, Sankt Georgen, in Frankfurt-am-Main. Professor Esack is the author of several publications, including Qur'an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity Against Oppression, On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today, and An Introduction to the Qur'an (all by Oxford: Oneworld). His current major field of interest and commitment is Islam and AIDS. He is the author/editor of a series of publications in this area, including Islam, HIV and AIDS: Reflections Based on Compassion, Responsibility and Justice. He has also published widely on Islam, gender, liberation theology, interfaith relations, religion and identity, and Qur'anic hermeneutics. Formerly a national commissioner on gender equality appointed by President Nelson Mandela, he has taught at the University of the Western Cape, at Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Gadjah Mada Universities, and at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was Distinguished Mason Fellow at the College of William and Mary, and he recently completed a three-year term as the Besl Professor in Ethics, Religion, and Society at Xavier University in Ohio.

A veteran of the struggle against Apartheid and an activist in the interreligious solidarity movement for justice and peace and that struggle, he played a leading role in the United Democratic Front, the Call of Islam, the Organisation of People Against Sexism, and the World Conference on Religion and Peace. In addition to his academic pursuit, he continues his activism through Positive Muslims, an organization working with Muslims who are HIV positive in South Africa, and through the several development boards on which he serves in South Africa and internationally. He struggles to live and understand the meaning of faith as well as an alternative liberatory vision in a world savaged by the empire and the often equally dehumanizing responses by its subjects and victims.