Sarra Tlili (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)
Project Title
From Sanctity to Rights: Animal Ethics in Islam
Frank H. Kenan Fellowship, 2025–26
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Florida
Email
Sarra Tlili is an associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Florida in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her main areas of research are animal and environmental ethics in Islam, Qur’anic stylistics, and tradition and modernity in Arabic literature. Her publications include Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge University Press, 2012), “All Animals Are Equal, or Are They? The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Animal Epistle and its Unhappy End,” and “From Breath to Soul: The Quranic Word Rūḥ and Its (Mis)interpretations.”
Selected Publications
- Tlili, Sarra. “An Islamic Case for Insect Ethics.” In Animals in Religion, edited by Dave Aftandilian, Barbara Ambros, and Aaron S. Gross, 112–16. New York: Routledge, 2024.
- Tlili, Sarra. “Qur’anic Creation: Anthropocentric Readings and Ecocentric Possibilities.” In The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an, edited by George Archer, Daniel Madigan, and Maria Massi Dakake, 135–44. London: Routledge, 2021.
- Tlili, Sarra. “The Canine Companion of the Cave: The Place of the Dog in Qur’ānic Taxonomy.” Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 3, no. 2 (2018): 43–60.
- Tlili, Sarra. “From Breath to Soul: The Qur’anic Notion of Rūḥ and its (Mis)interpretations.” In Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: A Festschrift for Everett K. Rowson, edited by Shawkat Toorawa and Joseph Lowry, 1–21. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017.
- Tlili, Sarra. Animals in the Qur’an. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2012.