Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shahbaz Khan Manj is currently serving as Chairperson of the Department of Islamic Studies, Division of Islamic and Oriental Learning, University of Education, Lahore, Pakistan, and is the Founding Chairperson of the Department of Islamic Studies at the University. He has more than thirty years of experience in teaching, research, academic leadership, and higher education administration, including service in universities and the Higher Education Department, Government of Punjab, Pakistan. His academic career has involved institutional development, curriculum design, postgraduate education, research supervision, academic publishing, and the strengthening of research culture in Islamic Studies and related branches of knowledge. 

Prof. Manj has served as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany. During his academic stay in Europe in 2026, he was engaged in teaching, lectures, and scholarly exchange at institutions including Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Heidelberg University, and the University of Bonn. At Göttingen, he taught the accredited M.A.-level seminar “Islam, Law and Society in South Asia: Tradition, Modernity and Contemporary Debates” within the module M.Ara.10 – Islamic Culture, Past and Present at the Seminar for Arabic and Islamic Studies. The course examined the historical development and contemporary transformation of Islamic law, religious authority, and social thought in South Asia.

He is the author of fifteen books and more than one hundred research articles published in national and international peer-reviewed journals. His scholarship addresses Qurʾānic interpretation, Ḥadīth studies, Islamic intellectual history, Islamic law, Orientalism, Islamic modernism, Muslim encounters with Western thought and modernity, religion and society, and contemporary Muslim intellectual debates.

For more than sixteen years, Prof. Manj has been actively engaged in postgraduate research supervision, with more than one hundred MPhil and PhD research theses completed under his supervision. He has also participated extensively in national and international conferences, seminars, workshops, lectures, and academic forums.

His international academic and professional exposure includes visits for academic, conference, seminar, institutional, educational, interfaith, and related professional purposes to Greece, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Poland, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland. These engagements have contributed to his work in international academic cooperation, comparative intellectual perspectives, interreligious dialogue, and scholarly exchange.

In addition to his university responsibilities, Prof. Manj has substantial experience in academic publishing and research evaluation. He has served as the founding editor of academic journals and as a member of advisory and editorial boards of national and international research publications. He has also served as an evaluator and examiner of postgraduate theses and has contributed to the assessment of faculty appointments, academic promotions, and scholarly work at different universities.

His principal research interests include Qurʾānic studies and modern interpretation; Ḥadīth and Sunna; Islamic intellectual history; Islamic law and jurisprudence; Orientalism and Western scholarship on Islam; Islamic modernism in South Asia and the Arab world; Muslim and Western approaches to modernity; Sīrah and Prophetic studies; mysticism and Islamic spirituality; interfaith and intra-faith dialogue; religion and science; jihād, extremism, and religious discourse; religious authority and ideological transformation; peace and coexistence; contemporary legal and social debates, including blasphemy laws in Pakistan; and religion, society, and social change in the modern Muslim world.

Beyond his formal university career, Prof. Manj has founded and contributed to several academic, research, educational, and outreach initiatives, including the International Federation for World Peace and Harmony, Al-Qamar Islamic Research Institute, and Al-Kindus International Schools. Through these platforms, he has promoted academic research, scholarly publishing, educational development, interfaith understanding, peacebuilding, intellectual exchange, and constructive engagement with contemporary Muslim societies.

Prof. Manj’s academic work is dedicated to promoting a balanced, contextual, historically grounded, and academically rigorous understanding of Islam in the modern world. His scholarship and institutional work emphasize interfaith harmony, peaceful coexistence, intellectual diversity, social transformation, and constructive dialogue across religious and cultural traditions. Through his teaching, research, supervision, publishing, institutional leadership, and international academic engagement, he continues to contribute to scholarly collaboration between Pakistan, Europe, and the wider international academic community.