Gregor Schoeler (born 27 July 1944 in Waldshut, Germany) is an Arabist and Islamicist with German and Swiss citizenship. His areas of research are the biography (Sīrah) of Muhammad, the Islamic system of teaching and transmission, Hadith, classical Arabic and Persian literature, especially Arabic poetry, belles-lettres and literary theory, the description of Arabic manuscripts and the classical heritage in Islam. In his research on the biography of Muhammad, he used individual examples to reconstruct the ways in which the accounts of Muhammad were transmitted, and showed that many of these accounts can be traced back to Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. 712/13), the nephew of Muhammad's wife ʿĀ'isha bint Abī Bakr. He also helped develop the method of isnād-cum-matn analysis.
Gregor Schoeler graduated from the Scheffel-Gymnasium in Bad Säckingen (Germany) in 1963. He first studied German and Romance studies, Philosophy and Semitic studies at the University of Marburg, the latter with Otto Rössler, and later Islamic Studies and Semitic Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt and University of Giessen. He received his doctorate in Islamic Studies in Giessen in 1972; his doctoral supervisor was Ewald Wagner.[1] From 1972 to 1973 and from 1975 to 1978 he worked as a research assistant on a project on the poet Abu Nuwas funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); from 1973 to 1974 he was an assistant at the Orient-Institut Beirut, which at that time was still maintained by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. From 1978 to 1980 he was engaged as a research assistant in the DFG-funded project for the cataloguing of oriental manuscripts in Germany. In 1980 he became a university assistant at the University of Giessen, and in 1981 he completed his habilitation in Giessen.
In 1982, Schoeler was appointed professor at the University of Basel, where he held the Chair of Islamic Studies until his retirement in 2009, and was head of the Oriental Seminar. From 1993 to 2010 he was co-editor of the Swiss journal Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques. In the spring of 2000, he was a visiting professor at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris,[1] and in March 2010 he was a Messenger Lecturer at Cornell University.[2] Shawkat Toorawa, professor of Arabic literature at Yale University, praised him on this occasion as "may be the most significant scholar of early Islam".[3]
His most well known work is the collected series of lectures known as Écrire et transmettre dans les débuts de l'islam, which is available in French, English and Arabic.
