Mbaye Lo

Mbaye Lo is Associate Professor of the Practice of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He works primarily on Arabic discourse with a sub-specialization in the sociology of Islam, Islamic militancy, and theories of civil society, in addition to the development of Arabic language and culture in Africa, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and oral proficiency-based language teaching and testing. His interdisciplinary background in both the humanities and the social sciences places his research at the intersection of language (primarily Arabic), society, and religion (primarily Islam). These intertwined concepts are the focus of his last three books published in English: Understanding the Muslim Discourse: Language, Tradition and the Message of Bin Laden (2009), Re-inventing Civil Society-Based Governance in Africa (2010), and Muslim Institutions of Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa (2015).