Sajoo, Amyn

Simon Fraser University, International Studies and History
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

asajoo@sfu.ca
+1 604-412-6848

Website: http://www.sfu.ca/ccsmsc/people/past-scholars/amyn-sajoo.html

Link to CV

Amyn B. Sajoo lectures in international politics and history at Simon Fraser University (SFU). He has long been affiliated with SFU's Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies & Cultures (CCSMSC). His research is at the interface of human rights, public ethics, and religion, with a focus on issues of minority citizenship as well as bioethics. Dr. Sajoo served as the 2010 Department of Foreign Affairs Visiting Academic in the Middle East, which took him to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. He is the editor of the Muslim Heritage Series (United Kingdom). The fourth volume in this series, The Shi'i World: Pathways in Tradition and Modernity, was published in 2015. He was previously affiliated with Cambridge and McGill universities, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London). Educated at King's College London and McGill University, Montreal, his early career was with the Canadian departments of Justice and Foreign Affairs. He also served as Canada-ASEAN Fellow in Southeast Asia, culminating in his first book, Pluralism in Old Societies and New States (1994). Subsequent works include Muslim Ethics (2004), Civil Society in the Muslim World (ed. 2002), and Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination (ed. 2008). A frequent contributor to the newsmedia, his articles have appeared in The Guardian, Open Democracy, The Globe & Mail, Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Areas of Interest

Bioethics
Blasphemy
Death and Dying
Democracy
Discrimination and Prejudice
Ethics and Morality
Media
Palestine
Perspectives on "the other"
Pluralism and Multiculturalism
Politics
Public Policy and Faith-based Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
Public Theology
Reasonable Accommodation
Religion and Public Life
Religious Beliefs and Practices
Religious Extremism
Religious Freedom
Reproductive Technology
Secular and Secularism
Shi'a Islam

Related materials

"The Fog of Extremism: Governance, Identity, and Minstrels of Exclusion." Social Inclusion 4.2 (2016): 26-39.
The Shi'i World: Pathways in Tradition and Modernity. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.
"Negotiating Virtue: Principlism and Maslaha in Muslim Bioethics." Studies in Religion 43.1 (March 2014): 53-69.
"Faith in Rights: Ethics of the Public Square." Open Democracy. 14 May 2014.
Review of Minority Rights in the Middle East, by Joshua Castellino and Kathleen Cavanaugh (Oxford, 2013). Ethics & Global Politics 7.1 (2014): 41-45.
"Fitting Islamophobia into an Historical Pattern." Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 34.2 (2014): 191-96.