Wael Hallaq

Wael B. Hallaq
Born	1955 (age 61–62) Nazareth

Wael B. Hallaq is a scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history. He is currently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. After a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, he joined The McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 1985, to become an assistant professor in Islamic law. In 1994, he earned full professorship, and in 2005 became a James McGill Professor in Islamic law.

Hallaq is considered to be a leading scholar in the field of Islamic legal studies. His work has been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Persian, and Turkish. In 2009 Hallaq was named among the 500 most influential Muslims in the world.

Hallaq first became known for his work challenging the notion of closing of the gate of ijtihad, i.e., the abandonment of independent reasoning in search of a legal opinion, which had been posited by historians such as Joseph Schacht to have occurred in Islam around 900 C.E. His recent work explores the paradigmatic structures of Islamic political and ethical thought, which he uses as a foundation for a thorough critique of modern ethico-political paradigms that, he argues, are dominant since the Enlightenment (The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (Columbia University Press, 2012).

Hallaq’s publications, lectures and course offerings reveal several dominant areas of interest and expertise. Primary among these have been: 1) a concern with the markedly problematic (yet often overlooked) epistemic institutional ruptures generated by the onset of modernity and the many socio-politico-historical forces subsumed by it (including Colonialism and its many projects), especially in the overlapping areas of law and morality; 2) a related concern with intellectual history and the development of Orientalism, and the many repercussions of Orientalist paradigms in later scholarship and in Islamic legal studies as a whole; and 3) a thorough explication of the synchronic and diachronic development of Islamic traditions of logic, legal theory, and substantive law along with an elucidation of the particulars of interdependent systems within these traditions.

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