Hasan Tauha is a PhD student in Islamic studies. A philologist and intellectual historian in-training, he enjoys a wide-ranging interest in Islam as well as the many other human and historical traditions of the world.
His latest preoccupation is with the early modern Muslim east—Persia, India, and, most recently, Southeast Asia. The question that now animates his research is that of belief in the unseen (Ar./Pr./Tr./Ur./Mal. ‘ghayb’) at the advent of modernity. He aims specifically to understand how theologians and philosophers wrestled with the fantastic subjects of jinn, angels, miracles, magic, and dreams in the aforementioned temporal, geographical, and epistemic mélange, with a special interest in moments of learned skepticism. He presented his master’s research, entitled “The Retreat of the Ghayb: ‘Mystical naturalism’ in three early modern thinkers of the Muslim east—Aḥmad Sirhindī (d. 1624), Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640), & Nūr al-Dīn al-Rānīrī (d. 1658)” at the 59th meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Washington, D.C. He has also published an interpretive essay on Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240)—“Reading for Ibn al-ʿArabī in Ibn al-ʿArabī: Concept of self as a non-doctrinal approach to the Shaykh al-Akbar,” Afkar 7, no. 1 (2025): 81-94.
Alongside his work on the history of enchantment, Hasan sustains an interest in the decidedly disenchanted field of historical criticism and in the sociology of irreligion. He completed his B.A. thesis, “Handling a Heterodox Muhammad: Challenging material about Muhammad in the early sīra literature,” on how the earliest sīra compilations censored, bowdlerized, or otherwise managed narrative material about Muhammad (d. 632) which threatened to unsettle emerging notions of orthodoxy. He was, in addition, a co-author of the Apostate Report: Leaving Islam in North America (2021)—the first systematic, large-N study of former (or ‘ex-’) Muslims in North America—and also helped produce EXMNA’s Persecution Tracker, which documents the stultifying persecution of blasphemy and apostasy within and beyond the Muslim world.
Long before enrolling in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies as an A. Bartlett Giamatti fellow, Hasan spent his early teenage years completing traditional madrasa study between the United States and Canada, where he memorized the Qurʾān and received ijāzas in the classical Qurʾānic variants. After high school, Hasan completed another year of full-time ʿālimiyya study at the Qalam Seminary in Texas, disillusionment wherewith spurred him on to the academic study of religion, first as an undergraduate in Stanford’s Department of Religious Studies—where he was advised by Rushain Abbasi, graduated ΦΒΚ, and named a Rhodes Finalist—and then as a master’s student at Harvard Divinity School, where he was recognized as Harvard University’s graduate student employee of the year.
Hasan grew up around Chicago, Dubai, and Atlanta and has studied abroad in Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, and Tajikistan. He is a student of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and Malay with reading knowledge of German, French, and Spanish. He has been skateboarding for most of his life.