Emeritus Professor Abdulkader Tayob

Emeritus Professor

Professor Abdulkader Tayob has published on Islam in South Africa, modern Islamic Thought and Islam and the History of Religions. He has led a number of research initiatives and projects and convened numerous workshops and conferences.
He completed a PhD (1989) at Temple University (Department of Religion, Philadelphia, USA) with a dissertation entitled: Islamic Historiography: The Case of al-Tabari's Tarikh al-rusul wa 'l-muluūk on the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Prof Tayob was appointed lecturer at UCT in 1989 and rose to professorship by 1999. He was soon recognised globally for his work and recruited to the Netherlands in 2002. He returned to UCT in 2006 to take up the South African Research Chair on the study of Islam in Africa.

Over thirty years, Tayob has left an intellectual legacy through publishing widely, setting up networks of scholarly engagement, and training a new generation of scholars. There is hardly a Department for the Study of Religion in Africa that has not been impacted by his scholarship and academic citizenship. 

His research outputs over the last eight years include nine peer-reviewed journal articles, nine book chapters and four edited journal issues. During this time, he was also invited to deliver seven keynote lectures.

In 2019, Prof Tayob was awarded the George Foster Prize for a lifetime of academic achievement by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. In the same year, he was made a member of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences. In 2023, Prof Tayob was honoured by the National Research Foundation with the Hamilton Naki Award.

Recent Publications

  • 2022. “Minorities Between State and Sharia Discourses in African Muslim Societies.” Islamic Africa, 13, 2, 2022, pp. 133-160. Doi: 10.1163/21540993-01302002
  • 2022. “Beyond Modernity: The Moral Economy of Ibn Khaldun.” Journal for the Study of Religion, 35, 2, 2022, pp. 1-17. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3027/2022/v35n2a4 
  • 2022. “Reform in the Discourse of Islam and the Making of Muslim Subjects.” In Routledge Handbook of Islam in Africa, edited by Terje Østebø, 223–35. Routledge.
  • 2021. “An Intellectual Journey in Islamic Studies: Navigating Islamic Discourse With Faltah.” Journal for Islamic Studies 39 (1): 11–27.
  • 2021. “Representation and Ethics: The Making of the Islamic World from a Place of Exile.” In Claiming and making Muslim worlds: religion and society in the context of the global, edited by Jeanine Elif Danğyeli, Claudia Ghrawi, and Ulrike Freitag, 277–96. de Gruyter.
  • 2020. “Religious Studies, Ethics and Modernity.” Journal for Islamic Studies, vol 83, 1–22.
  • 2018. Decolonizing the Study of Religions: Muslim Intellectuals and the Enlightenment Project of Religious Studies. Journal for the Study of Religion 31/2: 7–35. ISSN 2413-3027
  • 2018.  The Representation of Religion in Religion Education: Notes From the South African Periphery. Education Sciences 8, no. 146 (2018): 12pp. DOI: 10.3390/educsci8030146

Important links:
Academia site: https://uct.academia.edu/AbdulkaderTayob

Online CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JfRk8ok-41OElBdsY9tmtd43oeIF4Le_u0n1LvyLtcI/edit#heading=h.l0mz2grfh46l