Abdullah Saeed was born in the Maldives and holds degrees from Australia and overseas. He has a BA in Arab/Islamic Studies from Saudi Arabia, MA in Applied Linguistics and PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 1993, he joined the then Department of Asian Languages and Anthropology at the University of Melbourne as a Lecturer, rising to Senior Lecturer in 1996 and Associate Professor in 2000. He was appointed Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies in 2003.
Prof Saeed has taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Among the subjects he teaches are: Great Texts of Islam: Qur’an; Muslim Intellectuals and Modernity; Great Empires of Islamic Civilization; Islamic Banking and Finance; Qur’anic Hermeneutics; Methodologies of Hadith; Methods of Islamic Law; Religious Freedom in Asia; Islam and Human Rights; and Islam and Muslims in Australia.
He is involved in interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims, and between Jews and Muslims, and is a frequent and popular lecturer. He travels widely and has visited several times, for instance, North America, Europe, Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. He has a wide range of professional and research relationships around the world.
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His research focus is one of the most important issues in Islamic thought: the negotiation of text and context, ijtihad and interpretation. His publications cover Islamic finance, Muslim communities in Australia, Islamic law and freedom of religion, Christian–Muslim relations, Islamic thought in Indonesia, Qur’anic hermeneutics, Islam and human rights, and Islamic law reform. He writes for both scholarly and general audiences.
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