Dr Andrew Hammond
Dr Andrew Hammond

Position: Senior Lecturer in the Politics of Religion and Contemporary Islamic Studies
School and/or Centres: Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies

Email: andrew.hammond@anu.edu.au

Andrew Hammond holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, an MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Arabic and History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He previously worked as a Lecturer in Turkish History at the University of Oxford where he taught Late Ottoman and modern Turkish history and Turkish political and cultural texts. He was also a Middle East policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and editor at the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies; he is currently a senior non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute Switzerland. After graduation he worked in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE with BBC Arabic, Reuters, and others.

Hammond’s research has focused on modern Islamic thought, Islamic political movements, Late Ottoman Islam, Arabic media, modern Gulf politics and early Islamic history, using printed and archive material in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, modern Turkish and Persian as well as interviews. His books include Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought (2022), Popular Culture in North Africa and the Middle East (2017), The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia (2012) and articles in leading academic journals including the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Die Welt des Islams, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Association and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. He is an editorial board member of Arab Media & Society, published by the American University in Cairo, and regular contributor to online news magazine Middle East Eye and other media outlets.

  • “The Problem of the Quranic al-ṣamad,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 143/3 (2023)
  • Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought: Turkish and Egyptian Thinkers on the Disruption of Islamic Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
  • “Muslim Modernism in Turkish: Assessing the Thought of Late Ottoman Intellectual Mehmed Akif,” Die Welt des Islams, 62/2 (2022): 188-219
  • “‘The Imam of modern Egypt was a sceptic’: Mustafa Sabri’s radical critique of Muhammad ʿAbduh and modernist theology,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 32/2 (2022): 463-485
  • “Salafi publishing and contestation over orthodoxy and leadership in Sunni Islam,” in Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam, ed. Peter Mandaville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
  • “The Anglican Church Affair: A New Window on the Brief Rise and Fall of the Late Ottoman Islamists,” Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 8/1 (2021): 443-447
  • “Saudi broadcasting media – A tool for regional influence,” in Routledge Handbook on Arab Media, ed. Noureddine Miladi and Noha Mellor (London: Routledge, 2020)
  • “Contesting Legitimacy: Zahid al-Kawthari’s semantic war with emerging Salafism,” in ‘Militant Islam’ vs. ‘Islamic Militancy’? Religion, Violence, Category Formation and Applied Research: Contested Fields in the Discourses of Scholarship, ed. Nina Kasehage and Klaus Hock (Vienna: LIT-Verlag, 2020)
  • “Producing Salafism: From Invented Tradition to State Agitprop,” in Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed (Hurst: London, 2018)
  • Popular Culture in North Africa and the Middle East (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2017)
  • “Salafi Thought in Turkish Public Discourse since 1980,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49/3 (2017): 417-435
  • “‘Arab Culture’: From Orientalist Construct to Arab Uprisings,” Arab Media & Society (Issue 23, Spring 2017)
  • “Making Revolution Islamic Again: Protest and Rebellion from the Iranian Revolution to the Arab Spring,” Global Policy, January 2017
  • “Rereading Jihadi Texts: Between subalternity and policy discourse,” in Cyber Islam - Global Media and the Boundaries of Religious Identity, ed. Noha Mellor and Khalil Rinnawi (London: Springer, 2016)
  • “Obsessing over Jihadi Otherness: Radicalism’s Evolution and the Failure of the Post-Colonial Arab State,” Arab Media & Society (Issue 22, Spring 2016)
  • “Cinema and television,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
  • The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia (London: Pluto Press, 2012)
  • “Reading Lohaidan in Riyadh: Media and the struggle for judicial power in Saudi Arabia,” Arab Media & Society (Issue 7, 2009)
  • “Maintaining Saudi Arabia’s cordon sanitaire in Arab media,” in Kingdom Without Borders: Saudi Arabia’s Political, Religious and Media Frontiers, ed. M. Al-Rasheed (Hurst: London, 2008)
  • “Saudi Arabia’s media empire: keeping the masses at home,” Arab Media & Society, Oct 2007
  • What the Arabs Think of America (Oxford: Greenwood, 2007)
  • Popular Culture in the Arab World (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007)