Frederick Colby is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. He studied Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago (MA, 1995) and Duke University (PhD, 2002). His first book was an edited translation of Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman Sulami’s The Subtleties of the Ascension (Fons Vitae, 2004), and his second was a study of a popular version of the story of Muhammad’s ascension entitled Narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey (SUNY Press, 2008). He is the co-editor with Christiane Gruber of a collection of essays on Muhammad’s night journey (Indiana University Press, 2010). Colby’s most recent work has been with the history of Muslim festivals, and that has taken him to comparative studies examining early Muslim rituals in light of Christian and especially Jewish practices.