12 Facts About Tahera Qutbuddin

Tahera Qutbuddin was born in Mumbai in 1964 in a Dawoodi Bohra family.

Tahera Qutbuddin attended Villa Theresa High School and Sophia College for Women, where she completed her secondary education in 1984.

Tahera Qutbuddin received a bachelor's degree and a tamhidi magister from the Ain Shams University, Cairo, followed by master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, where her advisor was Wolfhart Heinrichs.

In 2002, Qutbuddin joined the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago.

Tahera Qutbuddin was made a Carnegie Scholar in 2008 and a Guggenheim fellow.

Tahera Qutbuddin showed how the traditions of the Tayyibi Ismailis moved to Yemen and thereafter in India after the death of al-Shirazi, where his poetry's influence on the Dawoodi Bohra community endures to present times.

Tahera Qutbuddin created a comparative framework between Arabic and Greek oratory, and explored how oratory was the foundation for the shaping of politics and public speaking, and thence to literature.

Tahera Qutbuddin had worked on it for over a decade, although she had had the idea for it during her undergraduate days in Cairo.

Tahera Qutbuddin explored the cultural milieu around Imam Ali and the aesthetics of his sermons.

Tahera Qutbuddin established that public preaching in the form of khutbah popular till today stemmed from pre-Islamic oratory, with texts available from decades before the founding of the faith.

Tahera Qutbuddin found that women held important positions in early Islamic society but would be permitted to speak publicly only in times of acute troubles.

Tahera Qutbuddin focussed on the interrelationships between political, religious and literary aspects of his life, aiming to reconstruct his life.