I am interested in the decoloniality of Islamic studies, particularly in thinking through epistemic diversity in the study of Islam and Muslims in Europe. To that end, I am currently taking the Islamic idea of beauty (jamal) as starting point to reconceptualize Muslim subjectivity, studying how Muslims in the Benelux are see(k)ing, aspiring to and actively pursuing beauty in their divine engagement and spiritual development. Anchoring the connection between the beautiful and the ethical in this process, I am also interested in how these aspirations and actions to "beautify" self, soul, and community, are used to create socio-ethical imaginaries about the future. Accordingly, it is also through the vector of beauty that I attempt to situate and unpack the lived tradition that is Islam. Using Al Ghazali's virtue ethics and the work of his contemporary “successor” Abdurrahman Taha, I am therefore ultimately interested in the dialectic between the beautiful, the ethical, and the imaginative. Additionally, I am interested in unpacking discussions pertaining to presupposed binaries such as the traditional/modern, secular/religious, and spiritual/religious, the prescriptive/explorative as it relates to Islam and Muslims.

More information about Sara Bolghiran

Fields of interest

Intellectual Islamic History| Contemporary Islamic Thought | Virtue Ethics| Anthropology of Imagination and Dreams| Islamic Dream Interpretation| Muslims in Europe| Critical Muslim Studies| Beauty| Islam and Poetry| Decolonial and Postcolonial Theory 

Research

The overall theme of Sara's main research pertains to meaning-making, subjectivity, and ultimately the theorization of Islam through non-dogmatic and non-scriptural means. To that end, she is  interested in the ways in which young diasporic Muslims in the West are rethinking Islam and engaging spiritually through aesthetics, philosophy, Sufism, poetry, and art, and how they use these matters to create ethical socio-ethical imaginaries of their future. Tied into this, she is interested in how these developments are indebted to turath, Islamic traditions of knowledge production and meaning-making in order to see/make sense of how what was inhabits what is, and to what can become.

Additionally, Sara's work focuses on Islam and (post) modernity, and the role of ethics and its connection to beauty/the beautiful.

Lastly, Sara also works on postcolonial theory, methodologies and epistemologies of the study of religion, particularly aiming to contribute usefully to how contemporary Muslim subjectivity is studied in Europe. 

Grants and awards

NWO Mozaiek 2.0

Selected publications

Bolghiran, Sara. "Allahu Akbar: When the Imaginative, the Ethical and the Beautiful Meet in Muslim Futures". Journal of Muslims in Europe, 13 (2024): 273–286, doi:10.1163/22117954-bja10115.