Professor Scharbrodt’s research explores how modern Islam is shaped through the movement of ideas, people, and institutions across borders. Focusing particularly on transnational Shiʿa communities, Islamic reform, and Muslim minorities in Europe, he examines how religious authority is constructed, contested, and transformed, and how communities negotiate identity, belonging, and socio-political change.
His work combines intellectual and social history with ethnographic research, drawing on Arabic and Persian sources, archives, interviews, and fieldwork across Europe and the Middle East. A central concern is the relationship between local religious life and wider transnational networks, especially within Twelver Shiʿism. He is interested in how clerical authority, reformist thought, migration, and minority settings generate new forms of religious organisation and political engagement. By connecting historical inquiry with contemporary fieldwork, his research seeks to explain how Muslim communities adapt inherited traditions to changing social conditions while reshaping broader understandings of Islam in the modern world.
