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Aiyub Palmer
Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies

 Aiyub Palmer is an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Kentucky. His focus of research is on Sufism and particularly sainthood and authority in early Islam. Palmer’s monograph published by Brill in 2019 is titled Sainthood and Authority in Early Islam, al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s Theory of wilāya and the Reinvisioning of the Sunnī Caliphate. In December 2021, Palmer presented a paper at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) in Paris, France titled “Towards a Wilāya-Walāya model as a Social Basis for the Master-Disciple Relationship in al-Sulamī’s Mujālasat al-Mashāyikh.” The colloquium, organized by CERMOM (Research Center for the Middle East and the Mediterranean) on a by-invitation basis, will publish its proceedings in May of 2023. In January of 2019, Palmer’s article “Revisiting the seal-structure of walāya in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam” was published in Brill’s Journal of Sufi Studies, discussing the important relationship between al-Tirmidhī’s concept of wilāya and the notion of walāya formulated by Ibn al-ʿArabī. In March of 2020, Palmer’s chapter titled “Sufism and Hadith” was published in The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith. In this chapter he demonstrated the important place of Hadith in Sufi discourse, highlighting the way in which Hadith study and dissemination influenced the way Sufis positioned themselves as masters of their own discipline. In April of 2019, Brill published Palmer’s encyclopedia entry “Maʿrūf Karkhi” in the Encyclopedia of Islam III and in March of 2022 the entry “ ͑Aql in Sufism” was published in the same encyclopedia. Palmer is currently working on a translation of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī’s Kitāb al-ḥikma for Gorgias Press.