Ze'ev Maghen

Ze’ev Maghen is an Israeli scholar. He is a professor of Arabic and Islamic history and chairman of the Department of Middle East Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Maghen is also a senior fellow at the Begin-Sadat Institute for Strategic Studies, as well as the founder of the Middle East and Islamic Studies program at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

Maghen’s areas of expertise include Revolutionary Iran, Islamism, the Islamic schism, Tafsir and medieval Islamic jurisprudence. He has written three academic books – Virtues of the Flesh: Purity and Sexuality in Islamic Discourse (Brill, 2005); After Hardship Cometh Ease: Classical Muslim Attitudes to Judaism and Jewish Law (De Gruyter, 2006); and Reading Revolutionary Iran (De Gruyter, 2023) as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals on these subjects. His essay Eradicating the Little Satan: Why Iran Should Be Taken at its Word was the lead article in Commentary (January 2009) and his lengthy treatment Shiite Messianism and Iranian Foreign Policy was the lead article in Middle East Journal (Spring, 2008).

Maghen has written on Jewish and Zionist subjects, as well, and his essay Imagine: John Lennon and the Jews – published in six languages – has been published as a full length book.^[1]

Maghen is fluent in Arabic, Persian, Russian, English, Hebrew and Yiddish. He lectures regularly in the Israel Defense Forces, as well as at universities and in other frameworks in the United States, Europe, Turkey, the Arab World, Russia, Ukraine, India and Latin America. He lives with his wife and four children in Hod HaSharon. He served in the Armored Corps until his discharge from the reserves in 2005. He was the 1984 International Frisbee Golf Champion (Junior Division).