After completing an undergraduate degree and professional qualifications in Optometry, Dr Ali-Reza Bhojani began studying at the Al-Mahdi Institute, graduating from its Hawza programme in 2008. He then moved to Durham University for 1+3 ESRC funded doctoral programme with the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). He was awarded a distinction for an MA in Research Methods (International Relations and Politics) and graduated from the doctoral programme at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2014. His thesis was published as Moral Rationalism and Sharī‛a (Routledge, 2015).  

He has held academic posts at the Al-Mahdi Institute where he lectured on legal theory, theology, and ethics, the Markfield Institute of Higher Education, the University of Nottingham and the University of Oxford, and is currently a Teaching Fellow in Islamic Ethics and Theology at the University of Birmingham as well as an Associate Research Fellow at AMI.  

Publications: 

• With Morgan Clarke. “Religious Authority beyond Domination and Discipline: Epistemic Authority and Its Vernacular Uses in the Shi‘i Diaspora.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65 (2) (2023): 272 – 295.
• With Morgan Clarke. “Free Speech as Ethical Speech in Islam: An Essay in Ethnographic Moral Theology,” in Free Speech, Scholarly Critique and the limits of Expression in Islam: Proceedings of the 9th AMI Contemporary Fiqhī Issues Workshop, edited by Liyakat Takim, 40-55. Birmingham: AMI Press, 2022. 
• “Linguistic philosophy in modern uṣūl al-fiqh: al-Ākhund al-Khurāsānī (d. 1911) on seeking something without willing it to be.” Méthodos 22 (2022). 
• As editor with Laurens de Rooij and Michael Bohlander. Visions of Sharīʿa (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
• “Visions of Sharīʿa: An Introduction“. In Visions of Sharīʿa, edited by Ali-Reza Bhojani, Laurens de Rooij, and Michael Bohlander, 1-9. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
• “Towards the Hermeneutics of a Justice-Oriented Reading of Sharīʿa,.” In Visions of Sharīʿa, edited by Ali-Reza Bhojani, Laurens de Rooij, and Michael Bohlander, 149-173. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
• “Appendix: al-Sayyid ʿAlī al-Ḥusaynī al-Sīstānī on Uṣūl al-fiqh in Twelver Shīʿī Thought: Its Importance and Historical Phases.” In Visions of Sharīʿa, edited by Ali-Reza Bhojani, Laurens de Rooij, and Michael Bohlander, 205-213. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
• “Uṣūlī Shī’ī exegesis of 9:122: A Potential Quranic ‘justification’ for collective ijtihād and consultative taqlid.” In Ijtihād & Taqlīd: Past, Present and Future, edited by Wahid M. Amin and Muhammed R. Tajiri, 1-8. AMI Press: Birmingham, 2019.
• Moral rationalism and Sharīʿa: Independent rationality in modern Shīʿī uṣūl al-fiqh (Oxford: Routledge, 2015).
• “Ijtihād in Traditional Shīʿī thought: Obstacles and Inconsistencies.” Shia Affairs 1 (2008): 113-129.