Beena Butool
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Wilson Ethics Fellow
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Beena Butool
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Wilson Ethics Fellow
PhD. in Religion, Florida State University
MPhil in International Relations, University of Cambridge
BA and MA in International Relations, University of Karachi, Pakistan
I teach courses “Religion and Ethics” and “Religions of the World” at UNI. Additionally, I have also taught senior level courses in religious studies on “Islamic Traditions,” “Biomedical Ethics,” and “Religion and Science.”
I am a scholar of Religious Ethics and Early Islam, and my research explores the relationship between the ethics of war and the expansion of early Islamic empire (7th-9th c). In particular, I am interested in examining the way medieval Muslim ethics were shaped by the project of empire, especially as Muslims interacted with Christian and Jewish communities in Late Antiquity. Consequently, I examine how ethical claims made by medieval Islamic scholars continue to influence Muslim ethics today. My ongoing publication efforts include studies on the Muslim ethics of war, disconnects between the late antique memory and the historical reality of Islamic empire, and the problems these disconnects pose for the disciplines of religious ethics and early Islamic history. I have also published essays on contemporary Muslim political ethics, their engagement with Christian political ethics, and their similarities with Western theorists. I recently co-edited a volume titled Race and Racism in the Sacred Texts and Human Contexts, published by Ethics International Press, UK (2026, forthcoming). I am also revising my dissertation manuscript, Between Kūfa and Basra: The Imagination of an Islamic Empire, for submission to Oxford University Press.