Iftikhar taught courses on Contemporary Muslim World, Muslim Diaspora, Modern Asia, the U.S. history, the British Empire, historiography, and the South Asian history and politics. In February 2015 and again in 2016, Iftikhar taught at the University of Helsinki as an Erasmus professor. During 2004, he taught an MA course (International Politics) at the University of Brussels, while in 2006, he was a visiting Erasmus Professor at the University of Barcelona (AUB). In July 2007, he lectured at the University of Peloponnese's International Summer Seminar held on the island of Hydra followed by another in Corinth in August 2015. In 2007-8, he trained more than one hundred EU election monitors for Pakistan at Pisa's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, followed by a specific workshop for EU safety personnel in 2009.
In March-April 2013, Iftikhar again trained several EU election monitors for Pakistan. On 23 March 2013, Iftikhar was a panellist along with Dominic Grieve MP, the Attorney-General, at the second annual conference on British Pakistanis, held at Oxford Union. Iftikhar has been an active member of the Punjab Research Group since 1990 and, among others, has convened conferences under its auspices in Bath and Oxford. In November 2012, Iftikhar presented two papers on Southwest Asian politics at an international seminar convened by Maastricht-based European Institute of Public Affairs (EIPA).
In November 2009, he offered a paper on security issues in Southwestern Asia at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and in February 2011 his paper focused on the parameters of civil society at a conference on Pakistan at Jamia Millia, Delhi. On 26 November 2008, he presented a paper to an international conference on Political Islam, convened by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels.
On 24 March 2012, Iftikhar was the keynote speaker at Spalding Symposium at Merton College, Oxford. He has published seventeen books and seventy research papers in international journals. His recent publications include Pashtun Identity and Geo-Politics in Southwest Asia (London, Anthem, 2016); a volume by New Holland Publishers (London along with a US edition, 2010), two books with Greenwood Press, USA, (2005 and 2008), a chapter in Amnesty International Lecture/OUP Series (2006); a paper in Seminar (Delhi, 2007) and ten Online papers for scholarly sites/journals. Three of his books have appeared from Oxford in St. Antony's Series and two volumes have been published by Oxford University Press. His two recent books deal with Islam and Modernity in reference to Muslims in Europe and the United States.
He has contributed articles in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, OUP's Encyclopaedia of Human Rights, Blackwell's History-Compass, World Book Encyclopaedia, Europa, World and Its Peoples, and several other reference projects. Iftikhar is an MCR at Wolfson College, Oxford, and lives in Bath and Oxford.
He has been an external examiner for the University of Bradford (1998-2002, 2005, 2008); and PhD examiner at the University of Exeter (2009); University of Birmingham (2007); University of Sussex (2007-8); Bradford (2013); Glasgow-Caledonian (2014); UCL, Preston (2014); the University of East Anglia (2015), and at the universities in Karachi, Islamabad, Multan, Bahawalpur, and Aligarh (1992, 2008, 2010, 2016).
He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is on the editorial board of six scholarly journals based in Oxford, Coventry, Stockholm, Edgehill, Karachi and Islamabad. Since 9/11, Iftikhar has offered 870 interviews to the print, audio and visual media on a wide variety of subjects.
