The Harvard Law and Religion Lecture Series presents
Ahmed El Shamsy
Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago
Professor El-Shamsy is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. His first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the eighth and ninth centuries. He is now at work on his second book, a study of the reinvention of the Islamic scholarly tradition and its textual canon via the printing press in the early twentieth century.
Sponsors: The Committee on Study of Religion; The Islamic Legal Studies Program (Law & Social Change) and the Julis-Rabinowitz Programs on Jewish & Israeli Law, Harvard Law School; Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Latifeh Aavani