Mahsheed Ansari is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Religion and Ethics and Society (CRES), Charles Sturt University. She is a community activist working in the areas of interfaith dialogue, education, social harmony and leadership-mentoring programmes with Muslim youth and women. Her research interests include the history of Islamic thought, spirituality and culture. She has been working on the Australian Muslim Heritage Project, that captures the contributions of Muslim Pioneers Post World War II, and she is currently writing a book on the Institutional integration of the Muslim community in Australia and Dr Ashfaq Ahmad’s contributions to it.
""Mahsheed Ansari offers a rigorous study of prophethood in Islam, focusing on the twentieth century responses of two major thinkers, Said Nursi and Muhammad Iqbal. The potential for the continued development of constructive contemporary Islamic approaches to this topic is enriched through Ansari’s detailed exposition of classical doctrines on prophecy as well as the South Asian and Turkish contexts during this period of challenges from modernity. Through its presentation of the creative responses of Nursi and Iqbal, who employed both critical intellectual analysis and mystical sensitivities in understanding both the historical human and the cosmic significance of the Prophet for their age, this work provides an important contribution in the field of Islamic religious thought and a resource for interfaith dialogue and understanding."" – Marcia Hermansen, Loyola University Chicago, USA