Mohammad Sagha is a Lecturer in the Modern Middle East at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University where he teaches courses on Islam, history of the region (including Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan), and contemporary Middle East politics. His scholarship addresses sectarianism in Islam and the emergence and flexibility of sectarian identity throughout Islamic history from the early Islamic period to the contemporary Middle East. In addition, his research focuses on imperial political order and resistance, theologies of leadership, and underground revolutionary networks in early Islam. In the contemporary Middle East, he examines Islamic and secular debates on sovereignty and the state, the dynamics of sectarian geopolitical competition in the region, and transnational connections between the Arab and Persianate worlds, particularly between Iran and Iraq. He is also a Faculty Affiliate and Research Director on Islamic History and Identity at the Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs at the Harvard Divinity School.

He is currently working on two book manuscripts on the intersection of political order and sectarian identity spanning the early Islamic period and the contemporary Middle East. Entitled Power and Belonging: Shi’a Religious Nationalism, Sacred Space, and Hybrid Politics in the Middle East, this co-authored book covers how Shi’a revivalist actors have utilized modern technologies, mass movements, and Shi’a transcendent political theology—along with the institution of representation of the Hidden Imam—to mobilize and lead anti status-quo politics in the region. The book relies on a rigorous interdisciplinary approach drawing on historical, Islamic, and regional studies as well as the field of political science. The work surveys a diverse array of Shi’a political movements, geopolitical competition in the region, and intellectual thought—ranging from Iranian revolutionary thinkers and Iraqi clerical networks to pan-Islamism in Lebanon and Zaydi revivalist politics in Yemen.

His other book manuscript, Hidden Empires: The Politics of Underground Shi’i Revolutionary Networks and Sectarian Emergence in Early Islam, examines sectarian emergence and political order, debates on orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and Islamic political institutions from before the Abbasid Revolution until the capture of Baghdad by the northern Iranian Buyid dynasty and the high period of the “Shiʿi Centuries.” The work studies the embedded imperial aspirations of underground Shi’a elites in relation to the Abbasid Empire and offers new theories on the emergence of Shi’a sects by examining social network relations between descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (Ahl al-Bayt) and the mawali ethno-social institutions tied into larger Islamic conquest, revolutions, and global empire. His research contributes to the field of Islamic studies as well as global history by providing the first historical survey work of early Shiʿimovements in a comparative revolutionary and socio-political context and advancing new theories on sectarian-imperial co-genesis that significantly impacted transregional societies across the Near East and Central Asia in profound and long-term ways.

Sagha received his PhD in Islamic History and Civilization from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Previously, he was a postdoctoral Division of Humanities Teaching Fellow and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC) at the University of Chicago. He was also a Co-Director of the Shiʿi Studies Group and received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago and wrote his thesis on the sociological networks of the emerging Twelver Shiʿicommunity at the time of the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Dr. Sagha was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Harvard University, working under the supervision of Professor Roy Mottahedeh on early Islamic dynastic military politics, as well as an editor for SHARIAsource at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. He is fluent in Persian with advanced command of Arabic and reading knowledge of French and German. His work has been supported by awards and fellowships from the University of Chicago, the Foreign Language Acquisition Fellowship (FLAS), the Islamic Scholarship Foundation, and the Hub Foundation.