Jan Thiele

I am a scholar in Islamic intellectual history and its textual heritage. Within this wider field, I have a particular interest in the discipline of systematic rational theology—or kalām, as it is termed in Arabic. My work covers the Muʿtazilite school of theology and specifically its reception by the Zaydīs, a Shiite community that has primarily survived in Yemen. This was the subject of two books, Kausalität in der muʿtazilitischen Kosmologie (Brill, 2011) and Theologie in der jemenitischen Zaydiyya (Brill, 2013), which won the Research Prize of the Annemarie Schimmel-Foundation for Islamic Studies. More recently, my research has focused on Ashʿarite kalām, more specifically on one of the school's major figures, Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī, and on the dissemination of Ashʿarite doctrines in the Maghreb and al-Andalus. I am the co-editor of the volume Philosophical Theology in Islam: Later Ashʿarism East and West (along with Ayman Shihadeh; Brill, 2020) and of the journal Intellectual History of the Islamicate World.

In 2008, I graduated with a Magister Artium (M.A.) from Freie Universität Berlin. In the same year, I was accepted to the interdisciplinary doctoral studies programme of the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin and defended my PhD in 2012. I continued at the same university for one year as team member of an ERC Advanced Grant. Then I took up a two years Marie Curie fellowship (co-funded by the EU and the Gerda Henkel Foundation) to work as Visiting Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (2013–2014). My second Marie Curie Fellowship (funded by the European Union’s FP7 within the Intra European Fellowship (IEF) modality), brought me to CSIC in Madrid. I was subsequently awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship and became permanent faculty member in 2021. In October 2017, I was Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.