Mohammad Atari has been awarded a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study the history of religious innovation in the golden age of Islam. Spanning the eighth through thirteenth centuries, this pivotal era produced extraordinary religious and scientific innovations that reshaped daily life from Spain to Central Asia. Dr. Atari’s project aims to uncover the historical-psychological forces that propelled this explosion of creativity and enabled new moral, faith, and ethical frameworks to spread so rapidly across regions and generations. By bridging humanities and computational social science, the research will analyze extensive collections of historical Arabic and Persian texts using modern language analysis tools to trace how shifting religious ideas influenced human reasoning, social problem-solving, and decision-making over time.
The multi-year grant will deliver major open-access resources for scholars worldwide, culminating in an interactive “Psychological Atlas” of the Islamic Golden Age, along with reusable text archives and analytical software. Beyond generating methodological and theoretical publications that connect historical religious change to psychology, the project seeks to deepen our fundamental understanding of how minds adapt to a changing social world. Dr. Atari's research will offer historical context to enrich contemporary conversations around religion, cross-cultural understanding, intellectual creativity, and human flourishing.