Michael Calabria, OFM
Fr. Michael Calabria is a Franciscan friar at the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe and director of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies at St. Bonaventure University. With more than 40 years of experience in the Middle East and Islamic world, he first fell in love with the region as an Egyptology student doing archaeological work in Egypt (BA Johns Hopkins, MA Brown). After working as an academic librarian in New York, he joined the Franciscan Order in 1996, later earning divinity degrees and a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter in England. He has lived in Cairo multiple times, ministered in a leprosarium, and taught English at a Coptic Catholic seminary. Since 2003 he has taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at St. Bonaventure University, where he founded the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies. He is the author of the 2022 book "The Language of the Taj Mahal," which explores the Qur’anic inscriptions on the monument, and has appeared in documentaries including "The Sultan and the Saint" (2016) and "Islam’s Greatest Stories of Love" (2025).
