Biography
Izzet Coban is a scholar of medieval Islamic intellectual history, specializing in theology, ontology, and discourse on nonbeing and apophasis. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2024. His dissertation examined debates in the classical Islamic period concerning nonbeing, negation, and the nature of divine knowledge and attributes, with particular attention to Shiʿi, Ashʿarite, Muʿtazilite, Avicennan, and Ismaili schools and their engagement with late antique and Neoplatonic traditions. His research reassesses long-standing scholarship that overemphasizes Greek influence by tracing the emergence of the concept of nonbeing to early Imamite/Shiʿi debates on badāʾ (God’s change of decision in response to new knowledge) and by situating later philosophical developments—most notably Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence—within earlier Muʿtazilite Bahshamite debates on attributes (ṣifāt) and nonexistence. His work is grounded in close analysis of sources in multiple languages, including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Attic Greek, Latin, German, and French. He has taught courses on introductory Qurʾānic Arabic, Muslim Christology, the Qurʾān as a historical, cultural, and literary text, and Muslim–Jewish relations at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Chicago and Loyola University Chicago.