Currently Fellow and Special Scholar in Residence at the Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman, Jordan under the patronage of the Jordanian Royal Court and Project Coordinator of the Great Tafsirs of the Qur'an Project, Dr Josef (Yousef) Waleed Meri received his DPhil in Medieval Islamic Studies from the University of Oxford (Wolfson College). A specialist in Islamic history, religion, and the history of ideas, Dr Meri's research interests include: the history, cultures and religious systems of the medieval and early-modern Mediterranean and Muslim worlds (ca 1000-1500 CE); Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations; history of religions; ritual studies, and the history of ideas in Muslim and Jewish contexts. He has previously served as a visiting scholar at the American Research Centre in Egypt, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, L'Institut Français d'Etudes Arabes in Damascus (IFEAD), the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley and most recently as Visiting Research Fellow in Medieval Islamic History and Civilisation at The Institute of Ismaili Studies (2002-2004).

The author of numerous journal articles and encyclopaedia entries, Dr Meri has also authored The Cult of Saints Among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, co-edited with Dr Farhad Daftary (London: I. B. Tauris in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2003). More recently he has published an annotated English translation with accompanying Arabic text of ‘Ali b. Abi Bakr al-Harawi's Kitab al-Isharat ila Marifat al-Ziyarat (A Lonely Wayfarer's Guide to Pilgrimage), a late twelfth-century pilgrimage guide to the holy places of the Muslim world and the Mediterranean (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2004), and served as General Editor for the general two-volume Routledge reference work, Medieval Islamic Civilization (2005).

Dr Meri is currently working on two publications, Sacred Spaces of Devotion in Islam and Pilgrimage in Islam (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press). He is also Sectional Editor of the on-line journal Religion Compass published by Blackwell.