Dr Mohamed Shahid Mathee

Overview

Mohamed Shahid Mathee is a Senior Lecturer in the Study of Islam. He joined the Department of Religion Studies in 2011 and is involved in teaching honours programmes and supervising postgraduate students. He graduated from Al-Azhar University in Egypt with a BA Honours in Islamic Law and Modern Civil Law. He later obtained a Master’s degree from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he also completed a PhD in Historical Studies. His research broadly explores the Muslim written intellectual tradition in Africa. This tradition encompasses fields such as Islamic law, history, language, theology, literature, medicine, politics, commerce, Sufism, exegesis, prophetic traditions, and more. His current research focuses on the social history of Timbuktu and Muslim West Africa, particularly examining fatwas on marriage, divorce, and paternity disputes from the colonial era, as well as the intellectual history of Timbuktu as reflected in chronicles from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Qualifications: PhD, Historical Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 2011 Selected Publications: Mathee, M.S. 2024. Yet Again Qurʾān 4:34: A Syntax and Semantics-Rhetoric Reading’, Journal for Islamic Studies, 42, 1-2. Mathee, M.S. 2020. The Kitāb al-Turjumān: a twentieth-century historiographical (Re)mapping of the southern Sahara and Sahel’, The Journal of African History, 61, 3, 359-382. Mathee, M.S. 2016. Curse motives in the “Curse of Ham narrative”: land for Yahweh’s landless people?’, Journal for Semitics, 25(2), 726-747. Mathee, M.S. 2016. Probing the Theological Resources of a Seventeenth-Century tārīkh: the Tārīkh al-Sūdān and Ashʿarī kalām Islamic Africa 7(2), 159-184. Nobili, M., Mathee, M.S. 2015. ‘Towards a new study of the so-called Tārīkh al-fattāsh’, History in Africa, 42, 37-73. Mathee, M.S. 2011. Women’s agency in Muslim marriage: fatwas from Timbuktu,’ Journal for Islamic Studies, 31, 75-95.