DR. JAVAD T.
HASHMI

Director of Research Dept. and Strategic Communications, MPAC;
MD & PhD Candidate, Harvard

Javad T. Hashmi is a board-certified emergency physician, former Fellow of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion (Islamic Studies) at Harvard University. In addition to his medical training, Dr. Hashmi holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Arabic & Islamic Studies from U.C. Berkeley and Harvard respectively. He was formerly a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace and Alwaleed Fellow at Harvard University.

Dr. Hashmi specializes in Islamic studies, with a focus on Quranic studies, Islamic intellectual history, and the question of religious violence. His dissertation work explores the ethics of war and peace in the Quran and in the Islamic tradition. Dr. Hashmi wants to keep his research relevant to contemporary discourses on Islam, modernity, and ethics. In this regard, he believes in the need to foster religious literacy, interfaith understanding, and a human rights discourse.

Dr. Hashmi came to the attention of MPAC after he decisively defeated Robert Spencer, the world’s most notorious Islamophobe, in a heated debate on the topic of religion and violence. He has joined MPAC as Research Director and will be heading up MPAC’s Research Bureau, which will seek to raise the level of public discourse on Islam.

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