Shahab Ahmed (Urdu: شہاب احمد‎; December 11, 1966 – September 17, 2015) was a Pakistani-American scholar of Islam at Harvard University. Professor Elias Muhanna of Brown University described Ahmed's posthumous work, What Is Islam?, as "a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto." The work was also listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education as one of the 11 best scholarly books of the 2010s, chosen by Noah Feldman.