Head of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies

Founding Chair, Council for Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies

Coordinator of Arabic Stduies

Dr. Souad T. Ali is Head of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies, Founding Chair of the ASU Council for Arabic and Islamic Studies; Coordinator of Arabic Studies; Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Easten/Islamic Studies in the School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC). She is simultaneously anAffiliate Faculty in the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Women and Gender Studies, African and African-American Studies, and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

A Fulbright Scholar, Professor Ali is the author of A Religion, Not A State: Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq’s Islamic Justification of Political Secularism (University of Utah Press 2009) that reached the top of Amazon’s List for “Bestselling New and Future Releases in Turkey” when it was released. Her second book, The Road to Two Sudans, an edited volume of which she is the lead editor, has been published internationally by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2014) and reached the top of Amazon's List for "Bestselling New and Future Releases" in Sudan History and North African History. Dr. Ali’s third book in progress is Kuwaiti Women in Leadership Positions. Additional international publications include several of Dr. Ali’s scholarly articles which have been translated into different languages.

Professor Ali's research interests cover a wide area including Arabic Literature, women and gender in Islam, Classical Islamic Texts, Islam and Secularism, Islamic Law; Sufism, Islam and Democracy, Islam and modernity, Quranic and Hadith Studies, feminist movements in Islam and the Middle East, Arab and Arab-American women, the emergent scholarship of Muslim-American women scholars, Sudanese women and Sudanese politics.

Dr. Ali is President of the Sudan Studies Association of North America (SSA); Board Member and Arizona Representative, as well as the past- President, of the of the American Academy of Religion/Western Region (AAR/WR).  She also represents ASU on the Governing Board of the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. In addition, she serves as Executive Committee Member of the International Association of Intercultural Studies (IAIS), Cairo, Egypt and Bremen Germany. She is also a Board Member of the Sudan Studies Association of North America and has been unanimously elected as President.

Professor Ali received a B.A. with distinction from the University of Khartoum and the Polytechnic of North London, a Masters with distinction from Brigham Young University, and a Ph.D. with honors from the University of Utah (2004) where she studied under Dr. Bernard G. Weiss.  Learn more.