Ilkka Lindstedt is Senior Lecturer in Islamic theology at the Faculty of Theology, Helsinki. He holds a PhD and title of docent in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in early Islam, Arabic historiography, and Arabic epigraphy.
His books include Muhammad and His Followers in Context: The Religious Map of Late Antique Arabia (Brill, 2024) and the Variorum Collected Studies volume Epigraphy and Theory in the Study of Early Islam (Routledge, 2026). Currently, he is working on a new biography of the Prophet Muhammad (under contract with De Gruyter) – one which takes seriously the material and other contemporary evidence from the Peninsula but also engages in detail with the classical Arabic biographies of Muhammad.
Lindstedt defended his doctoral dissertation, the primary supervisor of which was Prof. Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, in December 2013. Following his defense, he completed a postdoc at the prestigious University of Chicago, working with Prof. Fred Donner. After this, he received a postdoctoral grant from the Wihuri Foundation, before joining the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as a Fellow (2016–2019).
He was hired as Lecturer in Islamic Theology, the Faculty of Theology, Helsinki, in 2019; he was appointed Senior Lecturer in Islamic Theology in 2025.