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Masooda BANO Professor of Development Studies, Oxford Department of International Development; Principal Investigator, Changing Structures of Islamic Authority, University of Oxford

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 Professor Masooda Bano is Professor of Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. She specialises in the study of political Islam and historical and contemporary evolution of major centers of Islamic learning. Professor Bano builds large scale comparative studies using ethnographic and survey data and has studied Islamic movements across the Middle East, South Asia and West Africa. She also has done extensive work on examining the role of women in spread of Islamic knowledge. She is the author of The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan (Cornell 2012) and Female Islamic Education Movements: The Re-democratisation of Islamic Knowledge (Cambridge 2017). She has also edited many volumes including Modern Islamic Authority and Social Change (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2); these two volumes examine writings of leading Muslim scholars on the subject of Islam and modernity. Professor Bano did MPhil in Development Studies at University of Cambridge and DPhil at University of Oxford. She teaches on MPhil Development Studies and supervises doctoral students.