UMass Boston

Professor Haroon is an historian interested in Islam and Muslim social organization within the territorial and spatial configurations of modern South Asia. She teaches survey courses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean and upper level courses on modern South Asian history, Islamic history and oral history. 

PhD (History) School of Oriental and African Studies
BA (History) Yale University

• The Mosques of Colonial South Asia: A Social and Legal History of Muslim Worship (London: I. B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
• “The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis and political integration in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India”, Journal of Contemporary Religion 36. 2 (2021).
• "Custodianship of the Shahidganj in Colonial Lahore: Land, Land Use and the Formation of Religious Community", forthcoming, Indian Economic and Social History Review.
• "Contextualizing the Deobandi Approach to Congregation and Management of Mosques in Colonial North India", forthcoming, Journal of Islamic Studies.
• "Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam & Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands", in Nile Green ed., Afghanistan’s Islam: From its Origins to the Taliban. Forthcoming, University of California Press.
• “Pakistan between Iran and Saudi Arabia,” in Christophe Jaffrelot ed., Pakistan Today: Domestic Challenges and External Pressures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
• Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (London: Hurst and Co., 2007; New York: Columbia University Press, 2008; Paperback, 2012).
• “Reformism and Orthodox Practice in Early Nineteenth-Century North India: Sayyid Ahmed Shaheed Reconsidered,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 21.2 (2011).
• “Intersections of Religious Revivalism: Shari’a and jihad across the Durand Line in the Twentieth Century,” in Robert Crews and Shahzad Bashir eds., Alienated Nations, Fractured States: Afghanistan and Pakistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
• “The Rise of Deobandi Islam in the North-West Frontier Province and Its Implications in Colonial India and Pakistan,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 18.1 (2008).
• “The Visibility of Women and the Rise of the Neo-Taliban Movement in the Pakistan North-West 2007-9,” forthcoming in Magnus Marsden and Ben Hopkins eds., Beyond Swat: History, Society and Power along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (forthcoming, London: Hurst and Co.).
• "Social Organisation and Religion in the North-West Frontier Tribal Areas," Research on Sustainable Development (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2005).

Professor Haroon joined UMass Boston in 2012 and is a faculty member in the History and Asian Studies Departments. She held the Past and Present Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship 2004-2005 and the Malathy Singh Lectureship at Yale University 2011-2012 and she has taught at universities in London, Dubai, Karachi and Lahore. She has authored two books, The Mosques of Colonial South Asia and Frontier of Faith and papers on Islamic thought, reformist and Deobandi Islam, spatial practice and borderlands. Professor Haroon is co-director of the Women in Public Service in Pakistan oral history archive.

Courses

HIST 115 Survey of South Asia

HIST 251 South Asia in the Indian Ocean World

HIST 364 India Since 1857

HIST 365 Iran Afghanistan and Pakistan in Modern World History

HIST 456 Faith and Politics in Islam

HIST 688 Oral History