DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

A historian of Islam, Usman Hamid specializes in the study of early modern South Asia and its connections with Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. His research is invested in exploring the devotional and cultural histories of Muslim communities, with particular attention paid to the discursive and material expressions of their lived experiences. After receiving his BCom from McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, he earned his MA from the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining Northwestern, Hamid was Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Hamilton College, a liberal arts college in Upstate New York.  

His current research project charts how the circulation of texts, objects, and people across the Indian Ocean starting from the late-sixteenth century shaped the aesthetics of Muslim devotion to the Prophet Muhammad in South Asia. This devotional aesthetics cut across various embodiments of Islamic piety, ranging from the scholasticism of studying Sunni hadith and law to the ecstatic experience of being in the presence of material traces of the Prophet’s corporeal existence. The case studies examined are geographically situated in the imperial and sub-imperial cities of the Mughal empire spanning from the late-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. In adopting the theoretical lenses from the study of religious materiality, the project traces the contours of a piety that cohered around a deep belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet Muhammad’s body and its potential for sustenance and salvation.       

Before his work on Mughal India’s oceanic connections, Hamid has worked on the connected Persianate world of late-medieval and early modern Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia. This includes publications dealing with questions of social and cultural history, including on concubinage in late-Timurid Iran and Central Asia, as well as editing a special section of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East in 2017 on the migration of Iranians to early modern South Asia with Pasha M. Khan. Hamid’s research has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada.  

Selected Publications 

“The Footprint of the Prophet at the Gate to Mecca: Mediating Empire, Pilgrimage, and Prophetic Piety in Mughal Gujarat.” In Death Matters: Samādhis, Dargāhs and Relics in South Asia, edited by Brian A. Hatcher, Abhishek S. Amar, Mark McLaughlin, special issue, Journal of Hindu Studies 14, no. 2 (2021): 103–20. 

“Slaves in Name Only: Free Women as Royal Concubines in Late Timurid Iran and Central Asia.” In Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, edited by Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn Hain, 190–206. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 

Co-edited with Pasha M. Khan. “Circulation and Language: Iranians in Early Modern South Asia.” Special section, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 3 (2017). 

Co-authored with Pasha M. Khan. “Introduction: Moving Across the Persian Cosmopolis.” In “Circulation and Language: Iranians in Early Modern South Asia,”