Dr Aslisho Qurboniev

Dr Aslisho Qurboniev is a historian of the premodern Islamic world, with a focus on scholarly communities, knowledge production and transmission in Arabic and Persian, especially during the Fatimid period (909-1171). He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2015-2019) with a thesis entitled ‘Traditions of Learning in Faṭimid Ifriqiya (296–362/909–973): Networks, Practices, and Institutions’. 

Aslisho began his academic studies at Khorog State University in Tajikistan, where he studied Arabic and graduated with a Specialist Diploma in Oriental Studies, before completing the IIS' Graduate Programme in Islamic Studies and Humanities (2010-2012). Aslisho has an MPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he read Islamic Studies and History (2012–2014; Arabic and Ottoman Turkish). 

After completing his PhD, Aslisho joined the ERC-funded KITAB (Knowledge, Information Technology and Arabic Book) project at AKU-ISMC as a postdoctoral research fellow in (2020-2023). There he contributed to the OpenITI corpus, and worked on subjects related to book culture. 

Aslisho is currently completing a co-authored book on the cultural history of the Arabic book, working on his monograph on Fatimid Ifriqiya, and has published several articles and encyclopaedia entries.