Research/Areas of Interest:
Life and Thought of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali,
Religious Thought of al-Andalus and the Maghrib,
Sufism,
Contemporary Muslim religious discourse, especially in Egypt,
Education
- PhD, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States, 2005
- BA, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, United States, 1991
Biography
Ken Garden received his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2005. He is the author of The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: 2014). His current research centers the development of Sufism in North Africa and Muslim Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries. He also has a website that presents and analyzes examples of religious discourse from different currents in contemporary Egyptian Islam. His studies have taken him to Germany, Spain, Egypt, where he spent a year at the American University in Cairo in 1995-96 and the fall semester of 2011, and Morocco, where he lived for two years in Fez and Rabat from 2000-2002, and more recently the summer of 2010.