Chafika Ouail is a revisionist philosopher and a scholar in Islamic spirituality and theology; she is also a poet. She holds a PhD in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University in Beirut. Her work is concerned with revisiting the concepts and narrative of the Arabic and Islamic tradition by employing a multidisciplinary approach. During a postdoctoral fellowship at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, she studied the crowd in the Islamic tradition. At the OIB she studies the concept of neighbourliness as a spiritual paradigm. To this end, she tracks from a philosophical perspective the shift of this concept from the pre-Islamic era to the Sufi vision.

Chafika served as assistant editor of Al-Abḥāth and has been chosen to lead the editorial board of the forthcoming issue of Maghārib. She has published on a wide range of topics, including the making of the historical Sufi dictionary; the dilemma of Sufism between translating the experience and translating the language; an onto-semantic reading as a new approach to interpret the Sufi texts; ethics in the Qur’an between philosophy and spirituality; and the making of the crowd (jumhūr) in the Islamic tradition.