Michael Sells is the author of seven books and more than 60 scholarly articles on the Qur'an, Arabic Literature, Religion and Violence, Religion and Genocide, Bosnia, and Mystical Literature. He is also known for his articulate and compelling speaking style. His awards included the Gugenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment of the Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon fellowships, Columbia University Arabic-English translation prizes, and two American Academy of Religion Prizes for excellence in the study of religions. He has taught at Haverford College since 1984.
Dr. Sells is co-editor and contributor to the forthcoming book: The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (Columbia University Press, in press). This study probes the rise of violent anti-Islamic sentiment in the West, its relationship to anti-Western anger in the Islamic world, and the "clash of civilization" theory that posits an essential and unbridgeable conflict of values between Islam and the West.
Dr. Sells was a consultant and featured participant in the 2001 PBS series Islam: Empire of Faith, the first in-depth presentation of classical Islamic civilization to reach a major audience. He has discussed peace and conflict within and among religions on "National Public Radio," "Voice of America," The New Republic, The Philadelphia Inquirer, "The Twentieth Century with Mike Wallace," NPR's "The World," the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting and has been interviewed for major articles in the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.
His 1996 The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press) received the highest book award in the historical study of religion. It explores the relationship of religion and violence and explains the abuse of myth and ritual to motivate and justify genocidal acts. It also recounts the Bosnia tragedy through deeply human portrait of the suffering and hope in a shattered land. He has also developed one of the most extensive internet sites on war-crimes and human rights in the Balkans, with thousands of pages of documents and before-and-after photos of destroyed shrines and cities subjected to "ethnic cleansing."
Professor Sells has been particularly concerned that the Islamic sacred text, the Qur'an, is not accessible to Westerners in the present translations--translations that do not in fact reflect the way the Qur'an is learned and taken to heart in the Islamic world, and that lose vital aspects of Qur'anic language (tenderness, intimacy, subtlety, general harmony) without which the Qur'an can seem stiff and harsh. His 1999 book and CD, Approaching the Qur'an, now used in college courses around the country has been hailed by Muslim and non-Muslims scholars as a breakthrough in rendering the full register of tones, moods, emotions, and voices within the Qur'an.
Professor Sells is a scholar of Arabic literature who has lived in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, and carried out research in Syria. His 1989 award-winning book, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes, offers a translation of and commentary on the classical poetry considered to be the equivalent of Shakespeare and Chaucer within the Arabic world. He is also co-editor and major contributor to The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, al-Andalus volume.
Sells teaches regularly a course on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism. His 1994 book Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994) received a special honor from the American Academy of Religions, for precision and theoretical depth of its comparison of Islamic, Christian, and Greek mysticism--particularly those traditions of mysticism that offer the most valuable critiques of religious intolerance openings onto religious diversity. His Early Islamic Mysticism (Classics of Western Spirituality, 1996) focuses on foundation texts not only of Sufism, but of many aspects of Arabic and Islamic civilization. His books include his own original translations from Arabic, Greek, Latin, Medieval French, and Middle High German and analysis, written in a manner accessible to the non-specialist, but grounded in the original languages, texts, and contexts.
His work and passion involve translating (in both the technical and broader sense of the word) the cultural subtleties, the worlds of love, tenderness, nuance, humor, and lightness of being often missing from the portrayal of Islamic cultures in the West, with devastating consequences and stereotypes. He has spent years on studying this problem of interreligious and intercultural representation and self-representation, and worked with Muslim and non-Muslim scholars, clerics, poets, and artists to find a way that the human face of Muslims and Islam, the diversity of viewpoint, and the cultural subtleties that humanize religion, may be better communicated.
His most recent book, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn `Arabi and New Poems, includes translations of the love poetry of the Arabic mystical poetry Ibn 'Arabi (d. 1240), along with a section of his own original poetry. Professor Sells also teaches courses on love poetry of the Middle East and South Asia in translations (classical love poetry in Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Ottoman, Persian, and Hindu language traditions).
Dr. Sells is actively engaged in resistance to religious violence and work toward interreligious reconciliation. In 1993 he co-founded Community of Bosnia dedicated to resisting religious persecution and supporting victims of "ethnic cleansing" of all religions and to rebuilding an multireligious Bosnia--an organization that has helped Bosnian students to regain their lives and education and become leaders in the effort to reconstruct Bosnia and overcome religious barriers.
Sells has developed a course on Islam and the West, examining the affinities and the conflicts between the Islamic and Western worlds, with a focus on Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Sudan. The course has combined the study of the fundamentalism, the roots of the conflicts, and the development of religious extremism and violence, as well as class work on projects to support victims of violence and oppression in those areas. He is also a longtime member of the Southern Poverty Law Center with a special interest in the relation between fundamentalist religious groups, the Ku Klux Klan, the militia movement, and domestic terrorism. His current work focuses upon the fundamentalist sect known as Wahhabism, centered in Saudi Arabia, a sect that has fueled intolerant fundamentalist ideas in many areas, including Afghanistan, and has played a major role in supporting the Taliban.
Professor Sells received his PhD with high honors from the University of Chicago in 1992. After a two year Mellon Fellowship at Stanford University, he came to Haverford College where he has taught since 1984. Further information, a formal curriculum vitae, and photos can be found at his home page: http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/home.html
In the past year he has given public talks on the following topics: