Frank Griffel

I am professor of Islamic studies at Yale University in New Haven, CT, where I work on, well... Islamic studies. I am specialist of Islam's intellectual history, meaning the history of ideas that were formed in an Islamic context. I don't much deal with the Qur'an, which I find an immensely fascinating and interesting piece of writing, but my work sets in when the readers of the Qur'an start trying to understand it. I have always had a great interest in the movement of "falsafa" in Islam, that is the continuation of Greek philosophy after its translation into Arabic. My publications have focused on such authors as al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi (d. c. 1160), Ibn Rush (Averroes, d. 1198), and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210). Most recently, I published a monograph that tries to explain the dramatic changes that happened to philosophy in the east of the Islamic world during the 12th century ("The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam").