I am a Ph.D. candidate in Politics with a minor in History of Consciousnesses at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). I am trained in political theory and intellectual history, specializing in the history of anticolonial thought, Islamic political thought, and comparative political theory. I am particularly interested in analyzing and theorizing how liberal ideas are received, rejected, accepted, and reconstructed in Muslim political and social conditions during anticolonial struggles and their postcolonial iterations. I examine how new ways of thinking about the individual, politics and the state developed through various engagements with, and ambivalence towards, liberal ideas. My second strand of research, while derived from my normative and historical exploration, entails empirical investigation, which includes theorizing how ideas are embodied and practiced in political institutions and everyday actions within contemporary Muslim socio-political conditions in South Asia using surveys, interviews, and ethnographic resources.

My dissertation project, “Politics Beyond the State: The Origin of an Ethical Politics in Anticolonial Muslim Thought,” situates the question of individual and divine sovereignty at the center of anticolonial Muslim thought and action, by interpreting and theorizing the ideas and actions of selected anticolonial Muslim scholars and actors from 20th-century South Asia. Through analyzing their writings and the political actions, I recover and theorize what it means to be an individual, trace distinct ways of reasoning, historicize the idea of a political community, and above all, articulate a political imaginary that places religious ethics at the center of organized social and political life. In so doing, the project reconstructs a political vision that is neither centered on the state nor exclusively on individualized, rationalized, and secularized modes of politics. This political vision, deriving ideas from Islamic traditions of thought, offers democratic practices that are local and collective, where the individual’s moral and political life are part of the state but not solely determined by it. In both its subject and approach, my dissertation project contributes to decolonizing political theory.

My research has been supported by internal and external competitive grants and fellowships, including among others, the Hayden V. White Fellowship, and a grant from the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. My articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Review of Politics, Politics and Religion, Critical Research on Religion, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, among others. I am the convener of “UCSC Political Theory Workshop” and the graduate student co-organizer of “Global Political Thought,” a research cluster supported by the Humanities Institute (THI), UCSC.

I briefly taught at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Science and Technology University, Dhaka, Bangladesh before starting my doctoral training at UCSC. I received my M.S. in political science from Illinois State University and M.A. in international relations from South Asian University, New Delhi. Prior to that, I completed my undergraduate at the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh.

You can reach me at mrahman9@ucsc.edu.