Mustafa Kaya

I am a historian of Islam and the Muslim world with a focus on religion and politics in the late medieval and early modern periods. My research emphasizes the role of global religious trends in the political history of that era, from the rise of the Timurids to the making of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Safavid state.My dissertation examines the life and work of the Central Asian Sufi Zayn al-Din Khwafi (d. 1435) to illustrate the rise of shari’a-minded Sufism in the background of the political history of the fifteenth century.At the University of Chicago, I teach courses on the middle periods of Islamic history and mentor graduate students in the MA program in Middle Eastern Studies.