Michael Anthony Sells is currently the John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature at the Divinity School

University of Chicago Divinity School

The University of Chicago Divinity School is a graduate institution at the University of Chicago dedicated to the training of academics and clergy across religious boundaries...

 of the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

.http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/sells.shtml.
Michael Sells studies and teaches in the areas of qur'anic studies, Sufism, Arabic and Islamic love poetry, mysticism (Greek, Islamic, Christian, and Jewish), and religion and violence.

Work

He completed a new and expanded edition of his 1999 book Approaching the Qur'an: the Early Revelations. Also published three volumes on Arabic poetry, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes, Stations of Desire, and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, Al-Andalus, which he co-edited and to which he contributed. His books on mysticism include Early Islamic Mysticism, translations and commentaries on influential mystical passages from the Qur'an, hadith, Arabic poetry, and early Sufi writings, as well as Mystical Languages of Unsaying, an examination of apophatic language, with special attention to Plotinus, John the Scot, Ibn al-`Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Marguerite Porete. His work on religion and violence includes The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, and The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy which he co-edited and to which he contributed. He teaches courses on the topics of the Qur'an, Islamic love poetry, comparative mystical literature, Arabic Sufi poetry, and Ibn al-`Arabi.http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/sells.shtml

Christoslavism

Michael Sells argues that religious mythology played a crucial role in Bosnian genocide

Bosnian Genocide

The term Bosnian Genocide refers to either the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995 or the ethnic cleansing campaign that took place throughout areas controlled by the Bosnian Serb Army during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War....

. He wrote about the religious ideology of Christoslavism:

Sells argues that the genocide in Bosnia:

Sells argues that these acts were seen as ethnoreligious

Ethnoreligious

An ethnoreligious group is an ethnic group of people whose members are also unified by a common religious background...

 purification

Ritual purification

Ritual purification is a feature of many religions. The aim of these rituals is to remove specifically defined uncleanliness prior to a particular type of activity, and especially prior to the worship of a deity...

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External links

• Haverford College Homepage
• University of Chicago Homepage
• http://www.nytimes.com/specials/Bosnia/forums/sells.html