“The Muslim Gandhi”

Timothy Dobe, associate professor and chair of religious studies, has received the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars for his research on Mahatma Gandhi’s engagement with the Muslim community.

Dobe will receive $95,000, plus funds for research costs and related scholarly activities. He will spend the 2018–19 academic year at Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center. There he will work on his project, titled “The Muslim Gandhi: Islamicate Hinduism, Alternative Communities and Radical Religious Love.”

“This work has developed directly out of my teaching here at Grinnell and will feed back into it,” Dobe says. “The award will give me the resources and the time to further develop this major research on Gandhi.”

Dobe’s research focuses on the importance of Gandhi’s underexplored engagement with Islamic traditions and Muslim leaders. He examines ways in which Gandhi himself engaged with Islam, as well as how Muslim and Hindu communities continue to make sense of Gandhi’s legacy.