Václava Tlili

Václava Tlili is a lecturer at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, teaching at the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies, drawing on her academic formation in Ethnology (Ph.D.) as well as traditional training at al-Azhar University in Cairo and al-Zaytuna in Tunis. She specializes in the anthropology of religion and Islamic studies, focusing on lived Islamic traditions, ritual practice, and the social transmission of religious knowledge. Her work combines ethnographic research with historical and textual inquiry. Her research includes studies such as Forms of the Oral and Written Fixation of the Qurʾān Text: An Overview of Islamic and Western Perspectives, The Influence of the Environment on al-Layth bin Saʿd’s School of Islamic Law, Conversion to Islam and the Formation of Identity among Czech Muslim Women, and Uṣūl al-Qirāʾāt: A Brief Overview of the Science of Qurʾān Recitations and Its Formation from the Position of Traditional Qirāʾāt Literature. She is also co-author of the monograph Demography of the Middle East and North Africa and has translated seminal Arabic texts into Czech, including the Constitution of Medina and Umar’s Covenant. Her current research focuses on the anthropology of death and funerary practices in Islam, the resilience of traditional educational institutions (al-madāris al-ʿatīqa) in southern Morocco, and local theologies of sainthood (walāya) connected to pilgrimage sites in North Africa.