Saaleh entered as a doctoral candidate in Harvard's dual History & Middle Eastern program in 2023. His interests are housed in the Hanafi legal regime and political theology of the Mughal/Timurid and Ottoman empires. He plans to explore post-classical Hanafi legal theory (Usul al-Fiqh), the Mughal judiciary, Hanafi legal canons, and procedural law in the Mughal-Ottoman empires, interlacing his study with Maturidi theology and Mughal political thought, symbolized in jurist-kings like Zahir al-Din Babur. 

Saaleh studied a six-year traditional Dars-i Nizami course in South Africa, where he studied Arabic, Islamic law, Hadith, Tafsir, and theology, concluding with the sihah sittah.  He thereafter earned his BA at Columbia University in History, specializing in Mughal and Ottoman eras. His MA at University of Chicago focussed on Mughal emperors Shah Alam II and Aurangzeb, and Persian poetry, at the Center for Middle East Studies, and creative writing. Saaleh is training as a Mufti at Darul Qasim College, having spent three years writing fatwas, or legal rulings, on various topics as Islamic divorce law, Islamic ritual law, Islamic bioethics, and Islamic finance, while also traditionally-reading texts of Shah Waliullah and Taha Abderrahmane and Maturidi theology. Some of his essays may be read at Traversingtradition.com