Edmund Hayes gained his doctorate with honors from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He works on early Islamic history, in particular Shiʿi history, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. He is a founder-member of the Shiʿi Studies Group at the University of Chicago.

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Edmund Hayes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leiden University. He gained his doctorate with honors from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in June 2015. He works on early Islamic history, in particular Shiʿi history, focusing on the intersection of intellectual developments and social and political dynamics. He is currently investigating the relationship between fiscal policy and religious protest in early Islam. He also has ongoing projects comparing the institutions of excommunication in Islam, Christianity and Judaism; and investigating  the development of Islamic canonical revenues, ghanīma, fayʾ, kharāj, khums, anfāl, ṣadaqa, and zakāt, the ways in which these terms overlap and relate to each other, and the ways in which they were both practically applied and conceptualized by early Islamic jurists and thinkers.

He is also working on a book entitled “Agents of the Hidden Imam: the Birth Pangs of Twelver Shiʿism, 850-950 CE.” He has published, or has articles forthcoming in Iranian Studies, Comparative Islamic Studies and the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. He is a member of the Leiden University Shiʿi Studies Initiative (LUSSI).

Publications