Jonathan Brown

Jonathan A.C. Brown (b. 1397 AH / 1977 CE) is an American Islamic studies scholar and Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where he holds the Al-Waleed bin Talal Chair in Islamic Civilization. He converted to Islam and went on to earn a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, specializing in hadith sciences and Islamic intellectual history.

Dr. Brown is one of the foremost Western academic scholars of hadith and Islamic law writing in English. His major works include Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, a comprehensive academic study of the hadith tradition from its origins through the medieval period to modern debates, which has become a standard reference in university courses on Islamic studies. His book Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy addresses the interpretive tradition around prophetic sayings and how Muslim scholars across the centuries have grappled with difficult or contested hadiths.

He has also written The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon, a scholarly study of how the two most authoritative Sunni hadith collections achieved their canonical status. His work Slavery and Islam addresses Islamic perspectives on slavery and the historical and theological complexity of the topic.

Dr. Brown writes for both academic and general audiences and has been an important voice explaining traditional Islamic scholarship to English-speaking readers unfamiliar with the classical tradition. His work is characterized by rigorous engagement with primary Arabic and Persian sources alongside serious engagement with Western academic historiography. He follows the Sunni tradition and his work broadly defends the coherence and sophistication of classical Islamic scholarship against reductive critiques.