Abdulaziz Sachedina

Abdulaziz Sachedina (born 1942 in Mahenge, Tanzania) is a distinguished Twelver Shia scholar, bioethicist, and Professor of Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, USA. Born in Tanzania to a family of Indian Shia Muslim origin, he received his early Islamic education in Tanzania and India before pursuing advanced religious studies at the Hawza Ilmiyya in Najaf, Iraq and in Mashhad, Iran. He earned his PhD from the University of Toronto, where his dissertation examined Islamic eschatology.

He is one of the foremost Shia Islamic scholars writing in the English language, and his work has been instrumental in making Shia Islamic thought accessible to Western academic audiences. His research spans Islamic political theology, Islamic ethics, biomedical ethics, and comparative religious ethics. His most influential works include "The Just Ruler in Shia Islam" (1988), which examines the concept of political authority in Twelver Shia theology; "Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism" (2001), which argues for the compatibility of Islam with democratic values; and "Islamic Biomedical Ethics" (2009), which applies Islamic ethical principles to contemporary medical dilemmas.

He has served as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and various governmental bodies on issues of Islamic ethics and biomedical policy. He was involved in controversies within the Shia scholarly community regarding his positions on Islamic pluralism, which some traditional scholars found theologically challenging. He has been a pioneer in establishing Islamic bioethics as an academic discipline and has trained numerous students who have gone on to prominent academic careers. He is widely regarded as one of the most important North American Muslim intellectuals of his generation.