Taj Hashmi

Taj Hashmi was born in 1948 in Assam, India. He has an M.A. and a B.A. (Hons) in Islamic History and Culture from Dhaka University and a PhD in Modern South Asian History from the University of Western Australia. Hashmi is a retired Professor of Security Studies at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), Honolulu, Hawaii. Prior to this, he taught Islamic and Modern South Asian History and Cultural Anthropology at various universities in Bangladesh, Australia, Singapore, and Canada, including the Curtin University (1987–1988), Dhaka University (1972–1981), National University of Singapore (1989–1998), and the University of British Columbia (2003–2004). Hashmi is fluent in several South Asian and Islamic languages. He is a regular commentator on current affairs and global conflict in print and electronic media. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (since 1997). He was a visiting fellow at the Centre of International Studies, Oxford University, and a fellow at the National Centre for South Asian Studies, Monash University, Australia. He is a regular reviewer of manuscripts for several publishers, including Palgrave-Macmillan, Routledge. and SAGE. Hashmi has authored scores of academic and popular essays and articles on various aspects of history, society, religion, politics, culture, and security in South Asia, the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, and North America. His major publications are:

1. Fifty Years of Bangladesh, 1971-2021: Crises of Culture, Development, Governance, and Identity, Palgrave Macmillan 2022

2. Global Jihad and America: The Hundred-Year War Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, SAGE, 2014

3. Women and Islam in Bangladesh: Beyond Subjection and Tyranny, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000

4. Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920–1947, Westview Press 1992 and Routledge, 2019

5. Colonial Bengal (in Bengali), Papyrus, Kolkata 1985

6. Islam, Muslims and the Modern State (co-edited) (1994 and 1996). His Women and Islam in Bangladesh was a bestseller in Asian Studies and was awarded the Justice Ibrahim Gold Medal (Bangladesh) in 2001.

In 2022, Palgrave Macmillan published his Fifty Years of Bangladesh, 1921-2021, which is the first historical sociology of Bangladesh. It examines the country's what-went-wrong-syndrome during the first fifty years of its existence. The work is an exception to the traditional studies on modern and contemporary Bangladesh.