Dr. Mehrdad Alipour

Projectleader , Utrecht University

Personal Profile:

Dr Mehrdad Alipour is a Lecturer and VENI Research Fellow (leading the project Beyond Binaries) in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His research focuses on Islamic legal and cultural history, Shiʿi studies, and Iranian intellectual tradition. His work primarily examines the transformation of body politics, gender, and sexuality within Islamic legal and cultural contexts across the premodern and modern eras.

His forthcoming monograph, Intersex Bodies in Muslim Juristic Imagination: A Non-Binary Shiʿi Perspective, 1200–1919, and his co-edited volume, Intersex and the (Non)Binary Body in Classical Muslim Legal, Medical, and Literary Discourses, stem from his project, Beyond Binaries: Intersex in Islamic Legal Tradition. Mehrdad’s book, Negotiating Homosexuality in Islam: A Legal-Hermeneutical Examination of Modern Shiʿi Discourse (Brill, 2024), represents the first academic exploration of the discursive spaces for debating homosexuality within the Shiʿi legal context. His recent publications include “Navigating Body Politics in Shiʿi Legal Tradition: Examining Sayyid Kāẓim al-Yazdī’s Account of Non-Binary Intersex,” Journal of Islamic Law and Society (2025) and “The Nexus between Gender-Confirming Surgery and Illness: Legal-Hermeneutical Examinations of Four Islamic Fatwās,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (18(3), 2022).

Before joining Utrecht, Mehrdad was a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt (September 2020–July 2022), participating in a two-year project entitled Wege zu einer Ethik, which examined classical Islamic thought and its application to contemporary issues concerning gender and sexuality in Muslim communities. Following his advanced training at the Seminary of Qom (Iran), Mehrdad pursued his doctoral research in Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter (UK) from 2017 to 2021.

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