Aaron Rock-Singer

Aaron Rock-Singer is a transnational historian of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on Islamic and Jewish movements that fuse religion and politics.  He received his B.A from the University of Pennsylvania (2007), his M.Phil from St. Antony’s College, Oxford (2010) and his Ph.D from Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies (2016).  He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Raoul Wallenberg Institute and teaches courses in both Judaic and Middle East Studies.  Dr. Rock-Singer's research draws on mass and small media to trace the changing relationship between religion, politics and society in the 20th-century Middle East.  His first book, Practicing Islam in Egypt: Print Media and the Islamic Revival was published by Cambridge University Press (2019) and his second book, In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East, by the University of California Press (2022). He is currently at work on a third monograph, tentatively entitled Worshipping the Nation:  Exclusivist Politics in Mandatory Palestine, 1927-48. Bridging Islamic and Judaic Studies, as well as histories of Mandate Palestine with those of transnational Islamic reform, Worshipping the Nation draws on Arabic and Hebrew-language sources to trace the linked emergence of Islamic and Jewish religio-political visions under the British Mandate.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Sacralizing the Nation: The Adoption of Takfīr in Mandate Palestine, 1929-1935,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, forthcoming. 

“The Rise of Islamic Society: Social Change, State Power and Historical Imagination,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 64:4 (October 2022), 994-1023.

“Practices of Piety: An Alternative Approach to the Study of Islamic Movements, Religions 11:10 (2020), 1-15 (Part of a special issue, "Political Islam in World Politics”).

 “Leading with a Fist: A History of the Salafi Beard in the 20th-Century Middle East,” Islamic Law and Society, 27:1-2 (2020), 83-110.

“Reading the Ads in al-Daʿwa Magazine: Commercialism and Islamist Activism in al-Sadat’s Egypt,” The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 47:3 (2020), 444-461 (With Steven Brooke).

“Censoring the Kishkophone: Religion and State Power in Mubarak’s Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49:3 (July 2017), 437-56.  

“Scholarly Authority and Lay Mobilization: Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Vision of Daʿwa, 1976-1984,” The Muslim World 106:3 (July 2016), 588-604.

“The Salafi Mystique: The Rise of Gender Segregation in 1970s Egypt,” Islamic Law and Society 23:3 (June 2016), 279-305 (named one of the top 15 articles of the past 25 years for the journal in January 2019)

“Prayer and the Islamic Revival: a Timely Challenge,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 48:2 (April 2016), 293-312. 

“A Pious Public: Islamic Magazines and Revival in Egypt, 1976-1981,” The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42:4 (2015), 427-46.  

“Amr Khaled: From Da‘wa to Political and Religious Leadership,” The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 37:1 (2010), 15-37.