Dr. Nora Katharina Schmid

Biographical note

Nora K. Schmid (Ph.D. Freie Universität Berlin, 2018) is a postdoctoral researcher at Marburg University. She has previously held research and teaching positions at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Universities of Hamburg, Oxford, and Tübingen. Her research focuses on the Qur’an, Islamic asceticism, premodern Islamic intellectual and religious history, Arabic religious literature, and Islamic law. She is the author of The Ascetic Qur’an and Its Kharijite Readers (Brill, 2026). Her second book project is dedicated to the study of the origins of Islam in the nineteenth-century Middle East and the imprint of sectarianism on historical and philological scholarship during this period.

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  Key Publications

  Schmid, Nora K. The Ascetic Qur’an and Its Kharijite Readers. Leiden: Brill, 2026.

  Schmid, Nora K. “Louis Cheikho and the Christianization of Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Ascetic Poetry.” Philological Encounters 6, nos. 3–4 (2021), 339–73.

  Schmid, Nora K. “From Ethico-Religious Exhortation to Legal Paraenesis: Functions of Qur’anic Waʿẓ.” Islamic Law and Society 28, no. 4 (2021), 317–51.

  Schmid, Nora K., together with Nora Schmidt and Angelika Neuwirth (eds.). Denkraum Spätantike: Reflexionen von Antiken im Umfeld des Koran. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016.
  
  A full list of Publications can be found here.

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  Nora K. Schmid currently works on her second book project, provisionally entitled Confessionalist Philology: Rushayd al-Daḥdāḥ and the Study of the Origins of Islam. Taking the Lebanese merchant and intellectual Rushayd al-Daḥdāḥ’s (d. 1889) five-volume work Al-sayyār al-mushriq fī bawār al-mashriq (“The Shining Planet: On the Perdition of the Orient,” completed in 1881) as a point of departure, the study traces the contours of what may be called “confessionalist philology,” that is, scholarly writing combining historical and philological method with sectarian discourse, between the Ottoman Mashriq and Europe. Al-Daḥdāḥ’s intellectual pursuits reflect a sectarian undercurrent of nahḍa scholarship on early Islamic history in the late Ottoman period that has not so far received sufficient scholarly attention.

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  Nora K. Schmid has taught seminars and courses at undergraduate (BA) and graduate (MA) levels. Her teaching covers various topics, including the Qur’an, Islamic religion, Islamic asceticism, gender in premodern Islamic intellectual culture, religious and political opposition in early Islam, and sectarianism in the nineteenth-century Middle East.

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