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Omar Imady is a Syrian American scholar and novelist, and a Fellow of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews. He holds a BA from Macalester College and a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1993), where he studied under George Makdisi. From 1985 until 2008 he was a student of the Damascene scholar Muhammad Bashir al-Bani.
His scholarship spans Syria, Islam, and Sufism. It includes the Historical Dictionary of Syria (4th edition, 2021), An Inside Story of Modern Syria (2023), and Sufism and the Preservation of Syrian Spiritual Identity (2020). His work on the Qurʾān comprises the four-volume Divine Pronouns: Unlocking the Definitive Quran (2024–2026) and its companion, What He Actually Said (2026).
He is also the author of several novels, among them The Gospel of Damascus, translated into Arabic, French, and Spanish, and Erasures (2024), winner of the Literary Titan Gold Award.