William Sherman

William E. B. Sherman (B.A., Stanford University; M.A., University of California, Los Angeles; Ph.D., Stanford University) joined the UNC Charlotte faculty in fall of 2017. His research considers experiments with revelatory language across a wide array of Islamic literatures: apocalyptic texts, Sufi hagiographies, vernacular preaching, and inter-religious dialogues and polemics. His first book, Singing with the Mountains: The Language of God in the Afghan Highlands, was published by Fordham University Press in 2024. In this work, Sherman explores the messianic role that Pashto played for a community of Muslims in the region of the contemporary Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This mystical-messianic community (known as the Roshaniyya, or “people of light”) pursued Pashto as a divine language before falling into war with the Mughal Empire, a conflict that has radical implications for how we think of categories such as tribe, ethnicity, and race in the broader Islamic world.

His second book, Raids on the Revelational: An Encounter with Imitations of the Qur’an, extends similar inquiries into much broader contexts by studying the neglected genre of “Qur’anic imitation.” What these various imitations scattered throughout time and place suggest is that Muslims (and non-Muslims) have wrestled with the possibility of ongoing divine and revelatory language that spills beyond the pages of the Qur’an. This project examines the memories of Musaylima, the lessons of the Mahdawiyya, Baha’i revelations, the epistles of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Christian Evangelical tracts, the websites of contemporary apocalyptic seers of Iran and Pakistan, and even James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in its effort to understand how the Qur’an has pushed us to understand ourselves as mimetic beings in a world of language. Sherman intends to submit this project for review in 2026.

Sherman has also finished collaborating with Ahoo Najafian of Macalester College on a full translation into English of Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s stirring and macabre Persian epic of the soul, Musibat-Namah. The translation is currently under review, and its anticipated publication date is mid-2026 with I.B. Tauris under the title of The Divine Tragedy of ‘Attar.

As these projects on Islamic experiments with revelation and beguiling linguistic imaginations draw to a close, Sherman is transitioning to a study that examines how Muslim moral and ethical commitments are expressed through (and compete with) the dominance of global financial logics. By tracing how contemporary Muslim imaginations of the ethical life are shaped through the grammar of global finance and mass data, Sherman hopes to understand the hidden metaphysics of capital and to illuminate different forms of sociality and exchange.

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