Biography

Having been raised a Muslim, I have always carried in my heart a fascination with the vastness of the Islamic scholarly tradition and the richness of the lived experience of modern Muslims. After graduating from Highland Park High School in Dallas, Texas, I pursued an A.B. in History at Princeton University, where my interests in the history of Islam and the practice of medicine converged in research inquiring into the history of medicine in the Muslim world. This culminated in my graduating thesis which looked at paradigms of health in the late Nation of Islam. Through my MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Cambridge, I hope to focus on how a key socio-intellectual class in diasporic Muslim communities, the ulama (traditionally educated Islamic scholars), have engaged modern biomedicine and promoted varied paradigms and practices of health within Western Muslim populations. These important yet neglected histories will contribute to the project of building critical intellectual bridges between physicians/public-health experts and Muslim leaders like the ulama, with the goal of said enterprise laying not in producing a unilateral relationship between either of these domains but a symbiotic one. **Shaffin will commence his MPhil study in 2023.

Previous Education

Princeton University History 2022