Dr. Waleed Ziad is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to this, he was a Research Scholar in Law, and an Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School.
He received his PhD (with Distinction) in History at Yale University. His dissertation (entitled Traversing the Indus and the Oxus: Trans-regional Islamic Revival in the Age of Political Fragmentation and the ‘Great Game’, 1747-1880, 797 pp.) was awarded the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize, one of the two most prestigious Yale dissertation awards. He also received his undergraduate degree from Yale in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Economics, and his MA and MPhil from Yale in History.
At the intersection of social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Waleed Ziad’s research concerns the historical and philosophical foundations of Muslim revivalism and the varying revivalist responses to internal political fragmentation and colonialism in the ‘Persianate’ world (South and Central Asia and Iran). In this endeavor, he has conducted fieldwork on historical and contemporary Muslim mysticism and revivalism and material culture in over 140 towns across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan.
A core area of his academic research is the development of Sufi networks, spanning modern day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, India, China, and Russia. This has resulted in two books, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard, 2021; 354 pp.), and Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire: Bibi Sahiba and Her Sacred Networks (Harvard, exp. 2024).
Hidden Caliphate was awarded the 2022 Albert Hourani Prize, the most prestigious prize in Middle Eastern Studies (through the Middle East Studies Association) and the 2023 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Bloomsbury Pakistan 2022 Book Award and the British Association for South Asian Studies 2023 Book Award. In addition, he is managing an extensive network of archivists in a two-year Modern Endangered Archives Program grant to document Sufi shrine collections and sacred spaces across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions.
Another long-standing focus of Dr. Ziad’s research is numismatics and material culture of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, with particular interest in religious transculturation, dismantling notions of boundaries between Iranian, Turkic, Indic, and Arab cultural zones. His book In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022; 232 pp.) introduces a unique Hindu pilgrimage site of late antiquity centered on a cave temple in northwestern Pakistan, which existed as a monetarily independent polity from the 4th to 12th centuries. His monograph Beyond Khutba and Sikka: Sovereignty and Coinage in Sindh, 1300-1700 (under review; 200 pp.) looks at how sovereignty in the interstices of great empires was strategically articulated through coinage.
Dr. Ziad’s academic work has appeared in several leading academic journals and edited volumes and his articles on historical and ideological trends in the Muslim world have appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, the Hill and major dailies internationally.
Dr. Ziad has studied Arabic, Persian / Dari / Sabk-e Hindi, Urdu, French, Uzbek / Chaghatai, Sindhi, and Romanian.