WAEL HALLAQ

Wael Hallaq is a Palestinian-American scholar of intellectual history at Columbia University, where he holds the Avalon Foundation Professorship in the Humanities.

His work over the last half century has focused on legal theory and legal history, with increasing emphasis over the past two decades on the intersections of ethics, law, and political thought. He is considered a world-leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies and has developed a corpus of work that deploys major critiques of modernity.

He has published more than a dozen books and dozens of major scholarly articles on topics including law, legal theory, moral philosophy, political thought, and logic. Much of his writing over the last decade and a half has focused on an ethical critique of the modern project. In 2009, John Esposito and his review panel included Hallaq in a list of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world for his research and publications on Islamic law, although Hallaq hails from a Christian background.

Radical Separation of Powers

A History of Islamic Constitutionalism

Two centuries of Orientalist scholarship have denied that Islam has a constitutional concept. Premodern Islamic political practice has been subject to mistranslation, misinterpretation and condescension through the eyes of colonisers, and judged inferior to the norms of Western liberalism. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar of Islamic law, sets the record straight in this groundbreaking volume. Traumatised by the tyranny of absolute monarchies, Europe came to see in Islam everything that it despised about itself. By seeking to understand Islamic governance from within its own tradition of reason, Hallaq reveals premodern Islam to have a rich and distinctive constitutional tradition: starting from the individual as a political subject up to the power of executives.

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