Mehdi Khalaji

Mehdi Khalaji (Persian: مهدی خلجی‎‎, (born 21 September 1973) is an Iranian-American writer, scholar of Islamic studies and political analyst. He has been researching at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy since 2005, and is now a senior research fellow focusing on the politics of Iran and Shiite groups in the Middle East. He has frequently contributed to major media outlets such as The Guardian, BBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Khalaji is an American citizen.

Education and career

A native from Qom, the center for Shi'a scholarship in Iran, Khalaji studied Islamic theology in Qom seminary, and Philosophy in Tarbiat Modarres University, which is one of the country's leading Teacher Training Institutes.

From 1986 to 2000, Khalaji trained in the seminaries of Qom, the traditional center of Iran's clerical establishment. There he studied theology and jurisprudence, earning a doctorate and thoroughly researched on modern intellectual and philosophical-political developments in Iran and the wider Islamic and Western worlds. In Qom, and later in Tehran, Khalaji launched a career in journalism, first serving on the editorial board of a theological journal, Naqd va Nazar, and then the daily Entekhab. In addition to his own writing, he has translated the works of the Islamic humanist scholar Muhammad Arkoun and other modernist Muslim intellectuals.