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Jamal J. Elias is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and the Class of 1965 Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert on the study of Islam and Muslim society and has written widely on the Qur'an, Sufism, poetry and modern society, and his writings have appeared in English, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other languages such as French and German.
Elias hails from a prominent Pukhto speaking family of Mansehra District, Hazara, and attended Burn Hall School and Aitchison College. He received his BA from Stanford University, his MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Phd from Yale University in 1991. Before becoming a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Elias was a professor at Amherst College for many years where he taught courses on Islam and religion, and was the chair of the Department of Religion for some time. He has also taught at Yale University and Brown University.
He was called on to write to the Administrative Review Boards held at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps. The Boards were authorized to recommend whether Guantanamo captives should continue to be held in extrajudicial detention. One of the justifications offered for the continued detention of over three dozen of the Guantanamo captives was that they had participated in the activities of a Pakistani Islamic missionary group named Tablighi Jamaat.
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